Saddiq Dzukogi
Saddiq Dzukogi (@SaddiqDzukogi) is the author of Your Crib, My Qibla, forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press in 2021. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Oxford Review of Books, Kenyon Review, Oxford Poetry, Salamander, Southeast Review, and Obsidian, among others. His chapbook Inside the Flower Room was selected by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani for the APBF New-Generation African Poets Series. He was a finalist for the 2017 Brunel International African Poetry Prize. Saddiq is currently a PhD student in English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.
Palms
He can see her eyes, light jazzes inside
the lamp holders, in the spaces she leaves behind.
He says maybe his daughter is there in the night
as splintered moonlight. This is his own face
carved. Her mother shows him her own hands
says it reminds her of the girl
who suckled her breast. He touches the darkness
below her mother’s reflection.
It does not cling to his fingers
where memories sprout as fingernails. They lurk
on bulwarks like alligators, when his soul comes halved
in a haul, he hears the rupturing of his muscles,
her navel cord needling back from her body
into his stomach. Palms pulsate from fielding the body
that left. He wishes his hand could grow a mouth.
Wish that mouth would tell him how her rind
gathers the energy to nurse his universe.
He wishes he could hold his daughter.
The palm is a ritual site of holding.
In that palm he keeps massaging—expecting the oomph
of the child that once lay there to mold out,
spiraling up from the little lines
pitched in his hands. Every morning the routine of seeing
those palms continues, and her mother asks,
in her absence, what does she hold in these hands?
What Belongs to Him
This is how sorrow holds his mouth
without space. He believes your bones
tell stories the sun cannot
turn to ash. Your love
twinkles below his pillow,
there is no darkness. Always,
when he turns clouded, gives the river
a message; the mist crosses a bridge
peering up to your new world.
Sometimes wishes the whole universe
could explode in his mouth. He remembers
when you trapped a butterfly
beneath your fingers. He’ll forever be
in distress. When he’s lonely,
he yowls into a hand-mirror
until his reflection leaps out
like it’s running from a pack
of wolves. His loneliness scares.
It’s evidence he’s not going insane.
Back to Life
All the memories of his child
gather into a culture of tears,
a hulking shadow, grinning
in the corners of their small apartment.
Baha’s face pads as a moth
against the leaden lights of his thoughts.
Every single time he closes his eyes,
he pictures each drop of tears swelling
with Janna inside. Opens his eyes
to the umbrage,
befogging every grieving step.
He still senses her through skin,
the spaces where she rests her head
and falls asleep, the weight of love blankets
his body. His fingers, the pulsing toy
she craves to put in her mouth.
Wonders if memory is enough
to bring Baha fully back to life,
or if it’s safer that she continues,
secreted in his body.