Frame

By: Oladejo Abdullah Feranmi

My family photo hangs in a lifeless frame.  

I go home in search of solitude.  

In the room I was, 7-year-old,  

Perishing between gasp breath of mine  

That is always this room.  

It wasn't winter.  

My back buried like the dead.  

My face, a riverbed.  

I enjoy cricket as much as I am not good at it.  

I have always bowled this poem forward  

With a spot of happiness.  

My hands know so much of the future.  

There's a lot that can be touched into shape  

Without beating.  

I was a janitor of my memory,  

Vanishing little dirty things into a vertebrae  

Of months that kept me upright.  

I recall nothing else except for his pure tears  

And the holiness in his hatred.  

I'm a god of the in-between.  

I am trying softly.  

I am trying.  

The night I gave fireflies to the story.  

There is little to see or write it down.  

I kept sharpening my pencil until it became nothing  

And there's nothing to remember except smiling faces  

In a frame that kept hanging there.

---

Oladejo Abdullah Feranmi, a black poet, won the Deconflating Surveillance with Safety contest and received commendation at the 2024 HART Prize for Human Rights. He was a finalist in the Hayden's Ferry Review Poetry Prize '23, with work featured or forthcoming in POETRY, Heavy Feather Review, Strange Horizons, and more.

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