We are both fathers now, my father and I. How’s that ~ for having something in common? In truth, I envy the fatherless. For how defensible their sorrow is. ~If my father should die today, he’ll die without having held his only grandchild, though he’s only ten miles away from here. ~ Today, my daughter is three months old.Today, she’s six months old. Today, she is nine months old. Today, she’s twelve… ~ In the legend, (the one I dreamed—or did I make it up…?) a fatherless boy sleeps on the bank of a shallow stream with a rock as his pillow. When he wakes up, he walks down an endless street begging for water ~ Though he’s been dead for more than a decade now, do you still speak to your father, ~ Father? Tonight I am speaking to you live from the checkpoint that leads into The City of the Fatherless. I’m sorry. I have to go. The officer’s asking me for your death certificate. I’ll need to let him know you do not have oneyet. If he should ask, What do you mean? I’ll keep staring at him until he lets me through. I have nothing, I have nothing to lose, but time.
Farther
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“Farther” (poem), Autobiomythography Of by Ayokunle Falomo, Alice James Books, 2024.
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Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Ayokunle Falomo is Nigerian, American, and the author of Autobiomythography of (Alice James Books, 2024), AFRICANAMERICAN’T (FlowerSong Press, 2022—finalist for Texas Institute of Letters’ Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for Best Book of Poetry), two self-published collections and African, American (New Delta Review, 2019; selected by Selah Saterstrom as the winner of New Delta Review’s 8th annual chapbook contest). A recipient of fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, MacDowell, and the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program, where he obtained his MFA in Creative Writing—Poetry, his work has been anthologized and widely published.
"Mythmaking serves to create a bridge between what the human mind can understand and what we yet have language for. Yet here in this visually lush and lyrically dexterous collection of poems, Falomo offers his readers work that bends and reimagines the limits of language, blends the Divine with the digital present, contemporary music with the voices of the past while the speaker traverses the friction between their American & Nigerian heritage."
—I.S. Jones, author of Spells of My Name
"At the core of Ayokunle Falomo’s Autobiomythography of is a restless poet contending with myth as both vehicle for possibility and rigid construct of belief. Such a tension makes a means by which Falomo examines freedom and its foreclosure, the transformations they work on the self, love, Africa, flesh, ancestry, and artmaking. Omnivorously imaginative, slyly comedic, and disarmingly elegiac, Autobiomythography of is a bold and lively run at 'something much more mutable…, something that can’t be penned or pinned down.'"
—Douglas Kearney, author of Sho
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