a poem by ekoko omadeke

M Turning 30

You groaned you could put a baby in me

the night we mimicked Chocolate Candles II.

And I didn’t question the logic of a womb with shelves. 

Infants placed and returned like vases to watermarks. 

You should know making babies is a form of ceramics.

It takes the work of hands around a wheel.

It takes a man on his knees, softening his lover’s clay 

until she can pickle a body inside her own.

We skimmed magazines for caramel colored

babies that could be half mine and yours;

broke out scissors and littered 

your bed with a sheen of make believe.

I named them Darius and Yvette. The twins: 

Pleasure and Terror—born five minutes apart.

It was your birthday, your breath on my neck 

as you entered me from behind.  Or the number 

of women you mined and broke that made me shudder. 

A lace scroll of underwear arched its back against 

the rug. You taught our paper spawn to grow 

flowers. I taught them which flowers to cook.

Ekoko Pauline Omadeke is a Cave Canem fellow and graduate of New York University's MFA in Creative Writing program. Her work has been published in Ars Poetica and No, Dear Magazine. She is the founder and former curator of the Southern Writers Reading Series at Happy Ending Lounge. She spent a year teaching creative writing to 2nd graders through The Community Word Project's Teaching Artist Training and Internship Program. She misses the rural two lane roads of Virginia. But not enough to leave Brooklyn where she lives and writes.