Lucas Street, Iowa
The morning I contemplated suicide, again, my daughter was
on the phone singing about the bus and a father waving goodbye.
I have been dreaming again of my daughter, waving, like a flag
in the sky; of fallen lilies scattered over the River Landing;
of the parable of a knife that blessed a body with a window
through which its grief escaped—In Iowa, my neighbor shot himself
in the mouth three days after Thanksgiving. Earlier that morning,
he had sex with a man, and they both groaned like thunder, fleeing
the ribs of a dark, dimming sky. There were holes in the clouds that
morning. We heard them stomping on the hardwood, passionate anger
at their delayed liberations. The hunger for something gorgeously
brief. My neighbor’s humming as he, perhaps, arrived. He loved life.
He wore a bright-orange chiffon for Thanksgiving. Glamorous in
his disaster. His manifesto for leaving was absence. Said no one
loved him. I, too, am aching like an old sidewalk. To be touched
and walked over—to be sat on like a bench outside in the cold.
But I am loved. I am loved so much. The first word my daughter learned
to say was dada. I watched her in her play cubicle on the phone,
stacking balls over rectangles. It was a cold morning, and the birds
shook on the wires. They shook the wires. My living room drowned in books
I had not read—my bedroom, a countryside of dirty clothes. I thought
again of Anne Sexton’s Christmas Eve. The careful consideration
of motherhood while waiting for the sun to light up her grief. On
my work table, the photo in which I carry my daughter over
my head, her red dress dotted with white and green stripes. In the photo,
her mother’s eyes widened like bulbs in the tree in the corner of
the room. That Christmas, I did not go home. By home, I mean Wales.
Over the phone, my daughter touched my face. I weep and say I love
you. The performance of my life is ending, and I am sorry. I
truly am.
June ‘04
When, finally, the cab pulled outside the house in June of the leap year
when it hardly rained, the boys who had been waiting for me outside,
shirtless and clutching the félèlè balls my father had gotten all of us
last Christmas—before the flood, before god opened the roof of houses
on Ogunleye Street, and filled us all with precipitation, and a mother
and her child were found awashed in a gutter, still hugging, although swollen
as if pregnant with promise—the boys, dust settling on their eyelids bíí eyeshadow,
ran inside to announce you had arrived. Grandma tíí dé, they screamed in unison.
That year, the dogs, I thought, barked fiercely. And the wasps,
that evening, were in the way of the sun—caramelized like sugar forgotten
on fire—shadows already forming although the boys and I had planned to dribble one
another into the faint clearing of light. You thanked the driver. That year, I learned gratitude.
You stretched your arms as I ran into you. I stumbled. You laughed. The mint laughter,
like the clatter of rain, like Friday feet marching toward the masjid. As I rose,
the golden tooth in the corner of your mouth flashed like a coin catching the last light of day.
How now, often, years later, in a dream, you arrived in the same cab. The driver is a dog barking.
The boys, willow trees. The house, now painted sunset yellow, has a barber’s shop outside.
How, again, you smelled like mint, as if you were a freshly dead grandmother. The white china you wore
in the coffin, still the white china you wear in the dream. Your smile, cursive like a bad road.
You do not thank the driver. Or the dog for the diligent job of barking. How gently your fingers
ran across my low-cut hair. I, still a boy, running toward your embrace, fall, hoping I might catch
the golden tooth in the corner of your mouth, again, like a blade drawn too quickly to see.
Halo
Hallowed inside, I stare at the part of your back where the light
falls. I think of the house finch that landed on the weeping willow
outside Dey House the morning I am to meet the agent to talk about
the book I’m writing where, like you, children were disappearing.
The god of my grief hangs outside like a scarecrow. As a child, I
was afraid of the dark. The fang in the hand of night. I call that
morning—upon seeing the yellow wings of that bird on those green
branches that looked like a coat of fur—to brief you of the beautiful
morning. The fresh dew in the birdsong, the haze coming down on
Church Street, the students riding bikes to class. You are busy, and
I swallow the things I’ve not said. We eat each other like lions and
lions, and the bruise on my back is your finger drawing a map on
the bare fields of my life.
The gramophone plays Baba Ngani’s requiem, which my
grandfather wrote the morning he tried to kill himself. Again, your
hands touch my lips, and birds take flight inside me. Something
shallow finds an echo. Your lips shake when my teeth pull your
ear. Only the beating of our bodies against the tide and the creaking
bed, the crickets outside, and the sound of wind blowing through
Lucas Street. Beside us, the candles are soft like your skin. The
curve of that halo. You ask me what God thinks of rapture, and I
tell you of the children in my childhood again—how, in a dream,
something like a boat drowned us. Once, in prayer, I begged God
to give my suffering to the sea. You lick my face and rock me in
your hand. After, we unfurled one another like secrets. Your eyes,
flickering like the candles. No music is as profound as our moans.
A siren heading to a house on fire interrupts the night. “We smell
like smoke,” I say. We litter the room with our bodies. We read a
poem. We weep like the willows. The night outside smells like
smoke.
Once, at the beginning of winter, I tried to text you about ending
things. I deleted it. I tried to narrate the story of a woman’s cat
fouled by the demon in my sleep.
Desire can only take me so far. Isn’t it a miracle that grief turns me
inside? Like a mother’s rendering hand, the light in your back
touches something deep.
Here, we arrive, panting in solidarity with our ragged desires. You
ask what will make up for the cold months we’ve spent trying.
“See, the candle is burning out,” I say.
Adedayo Agarau is the winner of the 2024 C.P. Cavafy Prize. He was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University ‘25 and a Cave Canem Fellow. He is the Poetry Reviews Editor for The Rumpus. Adedayo’s debut collection, The Years of Blood, which won the Poetic Justice Institute Editors Prize, was published by Fordham University Press in September of 2025. Adedayo is a creative writing PhD student at the University of Southern California. He earned his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop ‘23.
He can be found on Twitter and Instagram @adedayoagarau.
