Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets' daily poetry dispatch. Read "Fuckery" by Ayomide Bayowa.

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Fuckery

By Ayomide Bayowa

Onto the shore           Adamian leisures,

rendering unsung hooks to lay hold of a fish.

One would’ve thought he had a gills problem

swattering fly’s helipad from his sinker roughly tiled

with mirroring scales. A flooring choice for a home

we plan to build on love. I chose to come with,

his root, to better live in his skin for survival

of the death— so second to none, sprouting in ridges.

For the hurt I bear is not a country built like bedframe

of interracial lovers. I crack open a revival grave

for something Caucasus enough to survive the luckless

welcome of any Anopheles rescue team sailing through

just in time with an unsterilized needle straw.

It takes more than a lick of a fuckery report for a flesh

that betrays itself trying hard to be free from the cannibals

of its woods, short of a Kenyan foot to hare here and there.

"But you done’ been out in them snow too long to know a white lie"

I could neither have been a voyeur, racist nor lyricist the whole time.

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Copyright © Ayomide Bayowa

Ayomide Bayowa is a Nigerian-Canadian poet, playwright and theatre Arts fellow of the University of Ibadan. He has a B.A in Dramaturgy and Creative Writing from the University of Toronto, and was the 2021-24 Poet Laureate of Mississauga. In 2021, he was a semi-finalist for the Cave Canem Poetry Prize with, 'Gills’ published by Wolsak and Wynn in 2023. He was a finalist for the 2023 National Poetry Competition and Frontier Poetry Global Poetry Prize.

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