Miscarriage | Adebayo Samuel Oluwaseun

on my mother’s bed, I am blood clotting, blood flowing, tears rolling down her cheeks, and my father’s persistent begging.

in my mother’s mind, I am gone again. In my father’s yawns, I am another effort wasted, I am a chore.

If it is 2 am and she feels wet from me, I have shown her what else the colour red can mean, except a rose is blooming already in my father’s midsection, and instead of pain, he foresees another bout of pleasure.

I am a traveller again in this poem, but somehow, somewhere,

I am the ocean of pleasure I have painted. I carry the grace of the mountains in my body, I swallow a poem and my mother gives birth to sticky blood instead. She must not know that I have revered her in all of my poems and that I have decided to surrender my life for her.

She must not feel pain. Which is to say that whether she’d feel the joy of carrying me depends on if she’d first loathe me. Me, whose first response to love is defiance.

So, instead of a child on my mother’s bed, I am just a memory of what could have been. She watches me as I weave her in a poem-themed sadness, she says nothing happens to the dead, only the dead happens to the living.

I am unformed in my mother’s womb, so I become a flower every time my mother opens my grave in her mind. Tonight, I am a memory that has asked to be masked in pain. I watch my mother grinning, and I know that she gets my message. She sees my love.

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