Silence like emptiness, is reciprocal
when you speak against a wall,
knowing
is a kind of burden.
I seized my daughter’s napkin from a cupboard’s silence
to fill my nose
with her memory,
a hummingbird whistles
down my throat. After
a hard swallow,
my daughter’s name news’es
into a world inside a pigeon’s abdomen, cracks
the margins that constrict
a universe of pain
inside my body the reverie
of an ousted world. I scour
the intensity of absence; the dissolving
capsule in my palm is a
lithe refrain packed
with daughter’s words
losing their opinions of multiverse—
smoke that soars
into the mouth of a sky
where it has no voice
Saddiq Dzukogi is Nigerian poet and the author of Inside the Flower Room, selected by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani for the APBF New Generation African Poets Chapbook Series. His recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Kenyon Review, Oxford Review of Books, Poetry Society of America, Gulf Coast, African American Review, Crab Orchard Review, Prairie Schooner & Verse Daily. He has won fellowships from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Ebedi International Writers Residency.