Epistle (It Was the Era of Worry)

for 2020 -

We would’ve liked to spell it out for the future, what it was like to live then, all the living we tucked away like clues in the garden of our removed. We couldn’t say what we wouldn’t, and wouldn’t say more than we had to, so we paced ourselves with filler words. All six stages of grief we lumbered through, but especially the one we avoided naming out of an affection for the walls. Remember, that command colliding beneath belonging - there I’ll be the one that names it. Don’t you remember our care for conflict beyond the vigils and write offs? Our skill was labor, the buzz and honey we split after reductions to agencies with unusual medicines and the greenest blues. Sweet and unserious made the hysteria that fueled our empire sweeter with the stripes we earned on exalted suits and diminishing returns. We hiked the price of parsley and loofahs. We watched the limits of our line items. We signed bonuses for our greedy and landed the very amenities amnestied from our fleeced. We settled for messes our mugs set aside their coasters. And when the ants came, we were too distracted by the newer bizarre, its top performing headlines which shared our stamina to fear the worst and feed our hunger for cookies or other delicacies that could leave us with a reckoning: small world.

Joy Ethic

Sometime between somersaults spright
in the punk summer of ‘05

and the suggested origins of scuff settled on its path
like a comet on the collar

of my favorite pair in ‘07. Then again, left to be
at a Midway gate among roving

tidings and a lemon lozenge I unlaced then launched
toward my lymph nodes in need

of a whiff of winter to trace a flight plan back home: me
heartfelt, in ‘12. And again,

several times after I was instructed to define myself
or at least my desires

during personality tests taken under duress.
And again, give or take

half a decade later, spooning broth in a bowl
as I glossed over hot air

cosplaying news rethinking recidivism in the workplace,
its bottom line and coffee-

time talks of budget cuts. I was one of them.
By now you know

of course, there was a tomorrow. After the tears,
lowball offers, ghrelin spikes, spiked

high fructose, paper-bag spinsters, and retro discretion.
The otherwise menacing, sincere

this time. Since I acquired a joy, however insufficiently
small it could have been to you,

sufficient for me. Returning each time, giddy.
We have a routine. It greets me like

a flash mob among a pack of wanderers: a surprise
party I had helped plan.

Originally from the West Side of Chicago, Olatunde Osinaike is a Nigerian-American poet, essayist, and software developer. He is the author of Tender Headed (Akashic Books, 2023), selected by Camille Rankine as winner of the 2022 National Poetry Series. Other honors include winner of the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize, semifinalist for the 92Y Discovery Poetry Prize, and honorable mention for the Ploughshares Emerging Writer's Award in Poetry. His work has received fellowships and support from Poets & Writers, Hurston/Wright Foundation, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University.