makes me older; it’s a museum of velvety
memories & old, broken things:
there, the smell of camphor
on boxed wrappers releases recollections—
her feeble frame before a cracked
waist-length mirror on Sunday mornings,
clad in a stone-laced blouse with white beads
the size of quail eggs around her wrinkling neck,
as if asking, Who says there’s no sweetness
in old wine skin?
in her room, there’s a bamboo mattress &
a clay kettle twice my mother’s age
but i’m drawn only to the white bowl
sitting on a stack of grimy Dr. Pepper bottles:
an enamel pot painted with the face
of the 4th head of state, Murtala Mohammed,
encircled by guilloché lines, the same engravings
tattooed on Alvan Ikoku’s twenty-naira note.
now that my dreams are full of other-motherly longing,
& my grandmother is across the fogward
shore of waking, i find succor in my reflection
on Murtala’s face. why can’t i confide in it?
is it not family now? i have stolen,
& i have seen my mother’s brothers steal,
from the same pot. what other nakedness
do i seek to hide?
