DANCING SLOWLY TO THIS BITTER EARTH

After Dinah Washington’s “This Bitter Earth”

The beauty of music is that someone
wishes they could still dance. I imagine

that in a room, a woman fits her
knuckle against a boy’s knuckle—

she mimics a clown, and the boy laughs.
I am that boy and that woman

might have been my grandmother, except that
my knuckle is meeting a fist of nothingness,

of dust. And there is no room. Ummi called
this dance the beginning of bruises.

Who made my body a carrier of music?
Two mouths meet in a brothel, years later. A slow

song burns like a cigarette dragged into the paradise
of a dying lung. Must be somewhere, my grandmother,

among angels singing me her unspent grace. One evening,
I tell her, at dinner, I am sad, and I don’t know why.

How she pulled me into her arms, squeezed the grief out.
How, now, in this slow music, I cover a stranger with

the tatter of my breath. How in their eyes, the bulb croons.
Always the door, never the chair, never the people in the room.

Adedayo Agarau is the author of The Years of Blood, winner of the Poetic Justice Institute Editor’s Prize for BIPOC Writers (Fordham University Press, 2025). He is a Wallace Stegner Fellow ‘25, a Cave Canem Fellow, and a 2024 Ruth Lilly-Rosenberg Fellowship finalist. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Agbowó Magazine: A Journal of African Literature and Art and a Poetry Reviews Editor for The Rumpus. He is the author of the chapbooks Origin of Name (African Poetry Book Fund, 2020) and The Arrival of Rain (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2020).