birthing a baphomet moth by Wasilah Oyekan
I scrape the scabs of my sorrow. Punish myself with productivity. Serve my stomach specs when it grants them entry. Burn my legs at the gym to strengthen them from straying. I need you the way an orphan needs a home. You were more than my lover. You were my teacher. You were my father. I am pitted against a pain that aims to garrote me with your absence. I am ensnared by an emptiness that never existed until I basked in the fullness of your presence. You, in your reckless persistence, peeled through prickly layers of preservation. Unearthed my scarred and naked heart. Nestled it like a newborn. Taught it your name. The day you asked to meet my mother, your ex requested one last phone call. You headed off to your balcony without telling me. I listened to the muffled cacophony of inevitable resolution. In the light of your history, our love was a preemie. Gasping to keep its heart in motion. Alarms blaring, plugs dangling, as you passed your outlets to the past to resuscitate connection. I left you tumbling down memory lane, your grievances dominoes collapsing into understanding. You. You are my son. I washed you and nursed you at my bosom. Until your incisors were inclined to bite. Until your sunken shoulders rose in might and your aloed burns yearned for iron. It scared you to be with one who has beholden your starkness in dusk and morn. When you share that you reconciled two days after, you tell me I deserve better. I watch you backtrack profession and pursuance into a broken record of looney tunes, lighting gas to facts in hopes that I will inhale its fickle fumes. I assume committing to me for those short-lived days of snuggles and laughter was akin to weathering a stormy haze. Hope, our rafter. Your jacket over my head, threaded with her memories, weighted with worrisome what ifs and wonderful if onlys. Your frail form, shivering. So cold that the wholeness of my heart and the tanginess of my tongue could not wield you from wistfulness. When I first declined dating you, you begged me not to grapple with feeling like Adam's apple. Before that, you likened loving her to being a blind man in a garden on fire. I am left fending off feverish frost in return. At the conclusion of your indecision, your backbone breaks. A bouncing baphomet moth springs in its wake.
Wasilah Oyekan is a neurospicy MFA candidate at the University of Alabama. She’s an editor of fiction and poetry at Black Warrior Review Magazine.
