each time I create a new poemchild with this burning magic

I relearn how to write one all over again, each poem its own unique frankestein-monster creation shaped from ethically-sourced, abandoned, awake, dismembered body parts sewn together with pieces of my sanity madness, dreams, tears, prayers, then pushed out through my blue, live wound / I embed my essence, force myself inside its bodyworld, I am, I become anything for my poemchildren—the unreliable narrator, the lost, wandering subject, the orange duskwound sky, the indifferent, callous goddess, the hungry, bleeding cities, the bejeweled, gold-lit, rain-slicked, gaping road, the ancient dead mothers, the endless, singing river / I either interrogate it—what do you want to be and what do you want me to be for you? or I let it lead me and so we come to discover each other, glistening, sated, naked, depleted of self, full of the other, at the endbeginning / then I slice open my skin with a crescent, bleed into the poem's mouth, I knead the blood and sweat and strain into its still amorphous body, rough it up a little, give it scars, wrinkles and calluses, harness smoke to cure it of newborn vernix caseosa paleness—a bloodied, old one with character will find a home / I widen the poem's mouthelbows for loud laughter,  large song to escape through / I obsessively pump in more light, subtract light, stuff in some darkness until its shadows and ghosts move just right / I fatten my poem, nobody wants a skinny thing with no meat on live bones, I then leave it, let it starve awhile, allow unforgiving sun and wind wizen it, then I slither back in with treats, appeasing smile, to feed and feed and feed / I remould my poem in different forms, cut out and stitch in and open up and close in until I settle for carving it in my image—big, sad, wet eyes, hungry, lost, adrift, full of ache, so much want, wracked with guilt and anxiety, laden with grief, all yearning hands, I give it additional limbs for more holding, more burdens, legwings to run and fly and dance and be more than I am / I make it afflicted, a pitiful, pitiful creature that hurts and bruises and is continuously haunted, I colour it, the pain(t) I use leaking unto the floor / then I breathe into the poem, awaken it, believe in it, name it, in turn, the poem heals me into life.



Genesis / Woman

Like you, I was young and vibrant/ once 
when the earth was still mostly unformed

The sun, just learning how to burn itself 
into light, warmth, paint the world vivid

And the moon, an embryo affixed to the womb of the night,
teetering on jelly limbs, searching for its own form of light, 

undergoing its first rebirths. We all were, still 
slimy with the wetness of the beginning.

I remember it all, how the night didn't know 
what to do with all of its unending hunger

and would devour all the colour
I, too, welcomed the darkness,

may its embrace name me
The stars lingering on its teeth, waiting, always waiting

Oh, it was all so new and shiny and awash in beauty
like everything afflicted with a beginning. And I, 

I was wild. My body, brimming with the storm,
couldn't contain me. Everything I possessed, 

that I let possess me/ 
I left in devastating chaos, robbed of breath

I escaped into dreams smothered with life
and sang with the birds

Yes, yes, you must believe, they were there, 
shimmering with us, they've always been here

I fluttered through all of that, 
waded, so lost and adrift, 

grasping/ for something
I aspired to be of the tethered

Even then, I felt it all— 
too much, too hard, too loud

My heart, what it was then
rippling with the intensity of it

And the water was alive, and so vast
I poured into its welcome & I became more 

whole by its purifying tongue
in all of that newness it was the oldest

so wise and calloused
"What was I made for?" I would ask it over and over

I had a face then, I got it from staring so long at a river
It was beautiful.

About the Author:

Aishat Yahkub is a creative, poet, and medical student from Ìlọrin, Nigeria. She is the first-prize winner of the African Human Rights Poetry Competition ’25, finalist for the Akachi Chukwuemeka Prize ’24 & was longlisted for the Poetry Journal Prize and the Idumaese Alao Prize ’25. A “Best Of The Net” nominee and member of The Swan Collective, her poems have been published in Fantasy Magazine, Brittle Paper, Agbowó, Full House, PoetryColumnNND, Poetry Sango–ota, The Shallow Tales Review, Peppercoast Mag and elsewhere. Her works seek to explore all that haunts the body and belonging. She’s a whimsy daydreamer, stubborn escapist, and lurks on Twitter @AishatYahkub.

Feature image by Matiinu Ramadhan on Unsplash