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Cold Open

By Olatunde Osinaike

for Charles (1950 -       )


Three stories below,
you’d mosey in, depart
in the same way:
short of our buzz or us
letting you in.

*

We knew you
as we wished
for you to be.

*

Several stories in,
a clip of daughters,
whom I’d never met
outside your home
page, appeared.

*

Small clues
I forget about you:
your olive cane,
your allaying limp,
your dappled chin.

*

To provoke
a gentler nature,
you once showed me
your hand, your two of hearts
facing me from the floor.

*

Twenty-two holidays
and not one did I think
about anything more
than passing you a plate
for your fixings.

*          

Blunt as you were,
you were gone.

*

One of our mothers
drove to Michigan,
unloaded her tank,
searched every degree
asphalt to sky.

*

We come see
about the ones
we are sure of.

*

Memory can be
partial, but
you told your sister
let me hold something.
You have her attention.

*

If you must know,
I buried
that other
mother, named by
absence.

*

For the you I have now,
I will quiz the moon.
 

 

 

 

Listen as Olatunde Osinaike reads Cold Open.
Added: Thursday, December 19, 2024  /  Used with permission.
Olatunde Osinaike
Photo by Jeremy Howard.

Originally from the West Side of Chicago, Olatunde Osinaike is a Nigerian-American poet, essayist, and software developer. Winner of the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize, he is the author of Tender Headed (Akashic Books), winner of the 2022 National Poetry Series, shortlisted for the Society of Midland Authors Award in Poetry and Nossrat Yassini Poetry Prize, and for which he was named the 2024 Georgia Author of the Year in Poetry. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Literary Hub, The Slowdown, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Best New Poets, 20.35 Africa, New Poetry from the Midwest, Obsidian, Wildness, and elsewhere.

Image Description: Olatunde Osinaike, a Black man wearing round gold glasses and a white shirt with text that reads “All Great Things Come From Chicago,” sits in a dark green armchair gazing forward with his head tilted.

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