Ethel

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Ethel

Ethel

taofeek cover jpeg.jpg — Tongueless Secrets

by
Taofeek Ayeyemi
Taofeek Ayeyemi, fondly called Aswagaawy, is a Nigerian lawyer and writer with works appearing or forthcoming in *Lucent Dreaming, Ethel Zine, the QuillS, The Pangolin Review, Minute Magazine, Modern Haiku, Hedgerow, Acorn, Akitsu Quarterly, Seashores, contemporary haibun online* and elsewhere. He won Honorable Mention Prize in 2020 Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize, 2019 Morioka International Haiku Contest, 2019 Soka Matsubara International Haiku Contest, 1st Prize in 2018 PoeticWednesday Poetry Contest and 2nd Prize, 2016 Christopher Okigbo Poetry Prize. His chapbook *Tongueless Secret* (Ethel Press) and full-length book *aubade at night or serenade in the morning* (FlowerSong Press) are forthcoming in 2021. When he's not in the court arguing, in the chambers drafting, in the bedchamber with his cats poeticizing or meditating as a Sufi, he'll be somewhere in the world talking. He is Aswagaawy on Facebook and Twitter.
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from Tongueless Secrets

What I See in My Night Walk

"We have certainly suffered
in this, our journey,
[much] fatigue."— Quran 18:62.

i

my sweat smells like a fatigued hope/and i watch/as it snakes down my face.

a falling star dissolves
into the community of fireflies.
some voices echo
from the cemetery:
the night birds',
calling on gone souls to return
to their deserted kingdom.

ii

there is the moon dancing on the surface of the lake & a stone breaks it into about sixty-six stars spreading into circles that are also the echoes of the stone. sounding like the voice of a newborn. like a language disappearing on the tongue of a dying man.

iii

there's a windstorm. i stumble on a fallen tree that blocks the way that leads to the river, the farm & the palace. i pluck a mushroom from its body. the tree wants to know me: unfortunately, i don't know myself.

iv

returning home,
cobweb has grown
across the sky
& all over our world.
every brick
has become a tombstone.
house numbers now read
like epitaphs.

i want to turn back
& i turn
but to move a leg
is to fall into the sky

even god is not happy
with what's going on.

v

mother says it's a ‘mare nightmere.’