Friday Mar 29

Aderibigbe Headshot D.M. Aderibigbe's first book, How the End First Showed won the 2018 Brittingham Prize in Poetry and is forthcoming from The University of Wisconsin Press, Fall 2018.
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How to be a Man


You begin with a matchstick,
wearing fire like hair.
Plant the flaming stick in a stove
sardined with kerosene-clothed charcoals.
Pot of water, give it minutes
to become liquid -nger.
A bowl of Semolina;
fill the pot, as one fills
a pothole with gravel.
With a pestle,
round and round you turn,
like the women before you did,
till it becomes solid
and smooth as flesh. Get a plate,
okan la won,
and you are on your way.