Oladejo Feranmi Abdullah
My father’s sun
grew legs,
wore a Sunday suit
and a honeyed tie.
Each room knotted itself
into arms.
Time flies—
my eyes return
to that boy in high school,
his pockets spilling hands.
I spent the night
counting the names sorrow bore
before it married time.
I freeze my mother’s hand
into all my minutes.
These eyes—still mine—
refuse her melting.
Below,
in the deep trench of nightmares,
a root tightens into a fist.
The dream turns over
without my body,
toward the younger north of day.
All roads—
confused coordinates—
burn into an embrace.
Oladejo Abdullah Feranmi, a black writer, won the 2025 Rehumanize International Contest and SEARCH Magazine’s Poetry Contest. His work appears in POETRY, Oxford American, Strange Horizons, Blue Earth Review and elsewhere.