Olaitan Humble

Olaitan Humble
is a Nigerian poet and pacifist who likes to collect quotations and astrophotos. He won the People’s Choice Award at EW Poetry Prize Awards 2020. He is Poetry Editor for The Lumiere Review and Invincible Quill Magazine. His work is forthcoming in Luna Luna, Dreich, CP Quarterly, In The Minority Press, Wine Cellar Press, Words & Whispers, Giallo, AGNG Mag, CỌ́N-SCÌÒ, Periwinkle, Doubleback Review and Morepork Press. He tweets @olaitanhumble.

Mother’s Dove II

alpha

your hickeys left a pool of semen on my neck
that night,
                    same night you held

a table knife to
my torso. I sashayed through the valley
of bliss but lost my sanity
to my own chagrin

[ the sky in the morn was a dish made
out of rotten recipes—
the birds walked, crawled
but never flew ]

so you emptied freshets of your stomach
acid into my mouth & called
it rain; & called
it snow; & called
it winter

/

& in what I thought was a dream you
took my heart to the
seventh heaven //

beta

now take this dove
to mother
she’ll remind you of history