M,
how much colour is peeled off a photograph before it melts into a memory? it’s another day & i still perceive you in different bodies—our cat—the passenger who sat next to me today—old newspapers—the dry ground—how long will this wicked cycle continue? i now admit my mind is a haunted house, a whiff of you & i’m thrown into a river of regrets, an abode where unfettered memories of you wash off their essence and leave. grief hides behind my photochromic glasses and every blink i make melts into an attempt at deciphering its shape. each day, i tread on troubled waters, a misstep and i condense into the broken pieces you left me. M, i don’t desire to be a wound returning to its blade, i want to fight this urge, this need to be a morning sky and repaint all your dreams orange, the hue of dawn. tell me to stop finding succour in sad songs and black coffee. teach me how to embrace a new day without a storm in my chest, how to make the evening sun reduce my qualms into dust, how to find reminders that these walls once held your light in their cracks. tell me how to remember that this house was once a home, was once you, M.
Bio:
TAIWO HASSAN is a writer of Yorùbá descent who currently resides in Ile-Ife, a poet, and a vocalist. A 4x Best Of The Net Nominee, his poems have appeared in Uncanny Magazine, trampset, Kissing Dynamite, Lucent Dreaming, The Shore, Brittle Paper, Dust Poetry Magazine, Ice Floe Press, Wizards In Space and several other places. He’s also an undergraduate student of Demography and Social Statistics at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ilé-Ifẹ̀, Osun State, Nigeria. His first chapbook, Birds Don’t Fly For Pleasure is published by River Glass Books.
