The aria is cloaked in contrition and the song decalcified in my throat: the mouth’s venial tendency.
It’s known that the heart is an orifice and whatever slithers out of mine brings me closer to obliteration.
“O dogged god, what grace reverts from my identity?!”
Upon the hosanna’s peripety, a rift in my psyche.
My hands are smeared with dirt. In a dream, I dug my grave. corporeal, the body’s exacerbated into perpetuity of grief.
It’s wontish of me to keep disassembling my history though I blame the world’s iniquities on the inceptive fruit.
Perhaps, I iterate at my depletion. Perhaps, memory is a birthing of smog.
Mostly, I am selfless— my heart’s encompassing of the world’s aggravations; gangrene festering from retrospective decays.
Lord, this: rid me of death, rid me of fruits falling too soon to their demise.
In everything, I wish for the audacity to be so beautiful, to be more blood than stones, to raise my middle fingers often, to have more wet dreams than nightmares.
Kei Vough Korede
Kei Vough Korede is a 21 years old poet from Nigeria. He considers himself a flaxen xenomorph. He reads the poetry of Carl Phillips, Emilia Phillips. He’s a stan of Ocean Vuong but believes on earth, we can be overtly gorgeous. He’s handsome and sad but that’s ok.
Photo by Maria Teneva on Unsplash