Kendrick Lamar’s United in Grief Plays on Radio as I Tune to the Common Denominator of Our Mo(u)rning

by Muiz Opeyemi Ajayi

Thomas Griesbeck

for Deborah Yakubu

“& you sister of my country burning & i am sorry & i am sorry & i am so sorry” — Othuke Umukoro

quell the flames. rewrite the violence in crimson. there’s no sweet synonym for lynching. no metaphor adhesive enough to gather grey ash into brittle white bones. girl a crushed petal. arsoned garden. black girl flayed. noir dreams writhing. papers reading like a dystopian novel. eunice slain. bridget beheaded. names of girls killed or missing clogging my mind’s margin. every c(o)up refusing to pass over spilling over. which is to say what the mind cannot hold erodes. a poet’s shitty reputation for remembrance. o’ lord teach us

the compassion of dogs. beautiful being with your name spelt in reverse. remind us how when unknown gunmen shot, our bleeding forgot the colour of re(li)gion. say. hijabee taking off niqab to mop the blood streaming out josiah’s arteries. o’ girl. medalled girl. maid with rosary of flames. & my heart bleeds. & my heart beats. & this country. constrictor boa. swallowing our sisters. mothers. lovers. dreams. & girl i want to unwrite the flames. unlight the match. uncast the rocks. unfuck religion. unfuck the country. unknit the grief like tarantulas webbing through our history.

---

Muiz Opeyemi Ajayi, Frontier XVIII, studies Law at the University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria. He’s an editor at The Nigeria Review, and has works featuring/forthcoming on Poetry Wales, Rough Cut Press, Nigerian News Direct, Kissing Dynamite, Ice Floe Press, The Aurora Journal, Shrapnel Lit, Brittle Paper and elsewhere. He was second runner-up in the 2021 PROFWIC Poetry Contest, and an ARTmosterrific Writer-in-Residence. He tweets @opendites.