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. ---------
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.