(For Onnie)
I have tried to count our minted coins:
They are Z+ of integers slipping through mind
Like a money changer sans numismatic head.
Perhaps I am a failed Pythagorean
Perhaps I am a failed mathematicist
That I have always been all my life.
‘We never return to find the things
We actually didn’t keep. Yet, there are things
We didn’t purposely keep, but
We return to find them anyway,’ she said.
This, then, shall be the obverse image
I content myself with hoping
That gratitude = all number theory:
Your clear bright eyes, like the sun
At 13:00, lined with kohl. Canonical binomials.
Thus, your name has become a totem in my wallet.
Tọ́pẹ́ Salaudeen-Adégòkè is an editor, literary theorist, critic and writer from Ibadan, Nigeria. 15/6, as he sometimes likes to be called, has been working on the connectedness of poetry and mathematics. He is the co-founder of Fortunate Traveller, a journal of travel literature. Also, he is the author of Transacting Stories, a chapbook of his travels across Africa, which was published by Invisible Borders Trans-African Photographers Organisation and was part of their exhibition ‘A Volatile Negotiation Between the Past and Present’ at the 2019 AfriCologne Festival, Germany and the12th Bamako Encounters – African Biennale of Photography, Mali. @LiteraryGansta is his alter ego on Twitter.