I grew up on the doorsill of transition,
searching for home at the threshold
of every new door, when my mother
held on to me at every edge thinking I’d fall
& dissipate like the man who took her love
to heaven.
The scars of loss left at the epicenter of her chest.
Every house we relocated into
became our home until they were were not,
with twinges of unsettlement eroding
my forgetfulness.
The eloquence of a new place is that
it prioritizes itself as home—
gives you the world on a platter,
because a platter could be
a wild tooth hiding in the dark
& your body stills like water at the bank
of a new place.
Like handbags, we lived on our mother’s hands—
maneuvering through the world
like hope. Every new house, on my mother’s cloth, left faces
sticking at the edge of her geles, kaftans, even the green sole shoe she
wore on my walimah—
Faces like the women telling her biography at night,
their teeth grinding boiled groundnut with their mouths
wide as the devil’s deception.
& at night, my inside ruptured with crushed anger,
chasing their shadows at the pathway of my silence.
Like the woman who said my mother’s body is a river
& men dissipate inside like dust.
Behind my mother’s back, they chew on to the hem of her cloth
& I see them, like rats at night.
& then we move, once again; a new door swallows our dreams.
They forget us, but I do not forget them;
the bite of their whispers on the edge of my mother’s cloth.
I pass through their house, I wave to them like denial.
In a new place, once again, we dance across lips
like sad songs at night.
Abdulkareem Abdulkareem (he/him) Frontier III, is a Nigerian writer and linguist. His works appear and are forthcoming on National Museum of Language, POETRY, Transition Magazine, Waxwing, Poetry Wales, Uncanny Magazine, SAND, Nat Brut, West Trade Review, LOLWE, Southern Humanities Review, Isele, Qwerty Magazine, Shallow Tales Review, Nigeria News Direct, & elsewhere. He is an MFA candidate at the University of Alabama.
Photo by Valentina Locatelli on Unsplash