Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize Honorable Mention, selected by the New England Poetry Club Board
Love Story
Here’s the tale of a woman who spent
many years on the backyard of love:
he burst into her house through the door
like a storm, chased with a gun
by his past. She hid
him inside her deepest secret
where she pasted memories
of heartbreaks: of failed love, of death.
Night stared at them: the two wrapped
in a single blanket in her bed.
The blanket moved and groaned. Morning
spilled on the windowsills and doorway
to her house: he was
gone like the night.
Hungry Man
Aburo mi owon, this was how the day
unfolded from your mouth:
mama mi, ebi npa mi.
Mother peeled and slashed a tuber of yam
to feed three sets of teeth. Blue sun,
hatched from a matchstick burned
beneath mother’s ceramic pot.
We salivated; slices of yam softened.
We chewed our teeth; slices of yam perished.
Mother smiled. Father arrived,
filled the room with curses;
his voice beat in our hearts,
as thunder on the walls of a building.
His empty stomach was a bowl of anger.
In a room built with our silence,
father was hitting mother.
Mother, Again
The bus drives me into nostalgia:
the window, the clouds gathering
around the sky. Evening dies
slowly; Lagos, lost in dusk’s huge frame.
The bus park’s halogen lamps lighten the night.
At the junction where I planted you
for the last time on my back, Mother, I sell my body
for a vase of flowers, for a bottle of nail polish.
I ply the road to the deteriorating
wall of your grave, where I inscribe
the debt I owe you with a brush
drenched with nail polish. I set
a vase upon your breasts
D.M. Aderibigbe is from Lagos, Nigeria. His debut book How the End First Showed (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018) won the Brittingham Prize in Poetry, selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and a Florida Book Award. Recipient of a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, he has received other fellowships and awards from numerous institutions including, The James Merrill House, Banff, Ledig House, Ucross, and Jentel Foundation.