Tobi Kassim
Single Line Contour
Feel like the sun
is putting it
back –
my body –
song bigger
than throatshape
waited
until blood
slowed
& breathing
felt deeper
pushed that
winterrain
cold out
out to the hair-
line of this being
pin
pricks in flesh
bodylight
filling in
Phase
Crystalline arc of development: a daylong
defining. All day the broken glass
before me; the crushed under the wheel
daily. Every stage of walking
splinters my path in bottle
colors: sky white
with clouds. Sky green water,
glaucous– must I stop
To trace their spillage? What small
collision brought them to this
phase? This vibration so separate
ground-down qualities retain
coherence. A story drains at the center
of their arrangement. The same story
uncontained. Is it given in my aspect
or did a cant toward the infinite streetlamp
put this star on the ground? It’s giving
crushed emanations all day in strewn parts.
I constellate my distances from home–
a dance to keep what I call my life crudely
distributed inside. Night footfalls
widen over my inner eye
recalibrate the broken
ground as a fracture in the sky.
Sink
All this ominous
shit popping off in
the sky. Even the sun goes
To bed angry. Red
promise of return
retracted. We were dusked
All over. Pink flushed
your cheeks like the sun
was falling in your tummy
The horizon sank
between us. how
do I approach this ledge–
the heat tightened
its throat overhead, words spilled
off the cusp of all
today was
meant to be,
where destined
meant to end, low
tide basin
in retreat, red
sand at our feet.
Tobi Kassim was born in Ibadan, Nigeria, and has lived in the United States since 2003. His work has been supported by a Stadler Center Undergraduate fellowship and an Undocupoets fellowship. He won Yale University’s Sean T. Lannan poetry prize. His poems have been published in The Volta, The Brooklyn Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Zocalo Public Square, and elsewhere. He currently lives in New Haven, CT.