Portrait of My Father as a Deafening Silence

by Hassan A. Usman

Kenrick Mills

When we learn to spell joy, we lose our lips —

our tongues perforated by grief.

They said home is a place for merriment, but our meals poison the hand that made them.

My mother applies a thick blush on her chin to withhold her cascading tears, yet

is called tears of joy. This is the house that produced an album of my first cry,

this bungalow, a nightingale; its strongest pillar, my father’s voice.

It’s questioning how a bird sings, but spreads a canopy of death inside its throat,

how baobabs thirst in rainy seasons, how a thing that sings life can be a metaphor for death,

or how the day breaks on your head, but leaves your surname sauntering into extinction.

To speak of my father is to wonder how a fish can drown underwater.

Say, a man brimful of life drank himself into emptiness —  opened the window of his house one night & went with the wind.

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Hassan A. Usman, pen-named Billiospeaks, is 2/4 of Next Generational Poets. He studies Counselor Education at the University of Ilorin, Nigeria. His works are/forthcoming in SprinNG, trampset, Olumo Review, IceFloe Press, Five South, Kissing Dynamite Poetry, Lunaris Review, The Shallow Tales Review, and elsewhere. He’s on Twitter and Instagram @Billio_speaks.