Look!
BY TOLU OGUNLESI.
What does it mean that at twelve
months they know to hold
random objects to the ear, grip
cold metallic light, submit
to vistas that swallow human
attention & spit out pixel/babel.
Look! glass that hides
the world, so much of it--
How do they describe what they see
when they troupe to talk toddler things.
Home
BY TOLU OGUNLESI.
"There’s going to come a time when you can’t go home... The house will be there, the people in the house won’t be there." — Lionel Richie Sr.
We always have to do a leaving.
Slow change of clothes, followed
By forgetting what naked means.
The passing of years, a commute
Between prisons: here, high walls
Too familiar; there, not present enough.
Like a continent stringing itself
Between bottomless gulps of ocean.
We fall asleep, alarm-less, in one bed,
Wake up in another, where the light
Patterns the pillows differently.
No time to figure things out,
Only enough to pack for the return
Journey, back to where it all began.
Tolu Ogunlesi’s fiction and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Wasafiri, Transition, Sable, Magma, Orbis, MQR, Westchester Review, Nine Muses Review, Ad Fontes, and many others. He's the winner of a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, a PEN/Studzinski Literary Award, and a Honorable Mention in the 2006 Concorso internazionale di poesia Castello di Duino. He was shortlisted for a 2023 Miles Morland Writing Scholarship. He has been awarded writing/research fellowships by the Nordic Africa Institute (NAI), Sweden; University of Birmingham, England; Rockefeller Foundation and Harvard University. He lives in Abuja, Nigeria. You can find him on Instagram and X (Twitter) @toluogunlesi.