To the Width of Everything | a poem by Wale Owoade

If I drop a drone

on your palm,

if you stroke it

we will die and

maybe heaven is

what our body

craves for, maybe

we want to push

our secrets to

the sound a gun

makes when a

finger kisses its dick.

It is selfishness to

pray to only one God,

so we created

another in his image.

You stroked flaccid

out of a gun

and said breathe

and it breathed.

A theory said

the universe is God’s

huge cigarette,

for you, it is my

microphone. I like

to think of your

palm as psalms,

so you are all those

great things I read

in the water I drank.

Anyway, I like

the way your psalms

adjust to the

width of everything.

This trigger is capital

to my gun, I want to

feel your fingers

trace the lyrics

of my song.

———-

Wale Owoade is a Nigerian poet and creative enthusiast who lives and writes from North-Central Nigeria. His poems have either appeared, or are forthcoming, in About Place Journal, Apogee Journal, Chiron Review, Cordite Poetry Review, footmarks, Radar Poetry, Spillway, The Bombay Review and Vinyl, among others. Some of his poems have been translated to Bengali and German.

Wale is a recipient of 2015 Tony Tokunbo Poetry Silver Award. He is as well the Publisher and Managing Editor of EXPOUND: A Magazine of Arts and Aesthetics. Wale also interviews contemporary poets at The Strong Letters and is the Founder and Creative Director of Bard Studio.