snapbacks sandpapered hellos and romeo pubescence
sunbathing and again in their presence every bobby pin i have not
picked up and every premise i do a pendulum for a tongue
a braided decency sweet potato pie and kisses frequent as allowance
a turtled neck for the times i have been afraid to stick one out for them
minding my own business the occasional pardon when i have not
listened hard enough a lifetime supply of calisthenics and my grandma
has had me watch Something the Lord Made more times than i can count
the last time we did we talked about child support how my mother
has never asked for any how she’s thankful that her daughter
has been able to handle it on her own but whatever happened to accountability
and there’s a scene in the film where the black doctor has a nightmare
that the sutures didn’t grow with the heart and it’s ironic
because the black doctor was hired as an assistant at the same school
i enrolled in as the story goes black people were seen as less than
so they employed him as an janitor in the meantime he had to go through
the back door to get into his own lab and can you imagine
what his wife must have felt what she must’ve readied for
when he returned home my grandma told me my mother
never cooked more than when my father would come from his bus route
i would cry and cry surely my mother would pick me up
in her arms with the stove still aflame as the story goes i have not
really talked to my father ever since he entered the wrong
bedroom last week my mother told me he still regrets it but i wonder
about accountability how my amen may not ever be enough so i am still
learning how to ensure my own so i stretch my arms across the small frame
of her back and i am able acquaintance once more and still something still
Contributor Notes
Originally from the West Side of Chicago, Olatunde Osinaike is a Nigerian-American poet and software developer. He is the author of the chapbooks Speech Therapy, which was a winner in the Atlas Review’s 2019 Chapbook Series (forthcoming) and The New Knew (Thirty West). A Best of the Net, Bettering American Poetry, and Pushcart Prize nominee, he is a finalist for the Southeast Review’s 2019 Gearhart Poetry Contest and placed 2nd for the 2019 Editor's Prize at RHINO Poetry. His most recent work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in publications such as Prelude, Puerto del Sol, Winter Tangerine, Cosmonauts Avenue, and the Columbia Poetry Review, as well as in the anthologies Best New Poets, 20.35 Africa, and New Poetry from the Midwest. He is currently on poetry staff at The Adroit Journal and an incoming candidate for Human-Computer Interaction and Information Systems at Johns Hopkins. For more, visit www.olatundeosinaike.com.
