Poetry / Kanyinsola Olorunnisola

:: talking to this socialist chick at the lauryn hill rap party while wearing very real diamond studs & wondering for how long this drink will last till i turn the colour blue & start running my borrowed mouth into the gutter. dumb blunt guts & all dirty things crawling out of unacknowledged wounds. ::

bring on the apoc­a­lypse already. if the class war does not hap­pen, i’m riot­ing. i thought we brought our pitch­forks & knives to eat the rich. there are hun­gry black ghosts inside of me, loud & starvin’. why twit­ter cock­block­ing those of us who get bon­er at thought of chaos? just words words words no action. words words words & hot takes that no cut blade, no cut flesh, no call unto blood. make we cut the flesh of dem streets & make the bitu­men bleed out it black blood. we bleed­ing. i bleed­ing. yeah, i def­i­nite­ly agree. we should total­ly go pipeline protest. my import­ed Eng­lish no co-oper­at­ing today. no stand still. no play the immi­grant game. the good immi­grant game. we dying here. we bleed­ing. i bleed­ing. band-aid no save us. nice hair. i said nice hair. i said i like your hair. no, these dia­monds are fake, i am mock­ing the gaudy dis­play of excess wealth. thank you, my lin­guis­tic flu­en­cy decides when to come on. like a switch. it’s a cop­ing mech­a­nism. i doubt they will send me back alive. i am no for­tune teller, i just know some things for a fact. so, should we like…get a room or something?

From the writer

:: Account ::

“social­ist chick” is heav­i­ly inspired by the elec­tric poet­ries of Danez Smith and Hanif Abdur­raqib. It is my exper­i­ment at putting my black­ness before every­thing, even lan­guage. I want­ed to express the very real expe­ri­ence of non-native Eng­lish speak­ers, the way the lan­guage can some­times get out of hand, the way the lan­guage can be woven (even ungram­mat­i­cal­ly) to con­vey the mean­ing we want at that moment. The major motif run­ning through the poem is a pre­ten­tious dis­course around per­for­ma­tive socialism—a ter­ri­ble trend I have encoun­tered on social media late­ly. My poet per­sona, despite wear­ing real dia­monds, pre­tends to be one of the strug­gling mass­es to avoid lib­er­al ostracism. I want­ed the theme to flow seam­less­ly through a very casu­al par­ty conversation.

Kanyin­so­la Olorun­niso­la is an exper­i­men­tal poet, essay­ist, and writer of fic­tion. His works have appeared in Gertrude, Pop­u­la, Bode­ga, On the Sea­wall, Bom­bay Review, Kala­hari Review, Gyro­scope Review, Arts and Africa, African Writer, Brit­tle Paper, and else­where. He is the author of the chap­book, In My Coun­try, We’re All Cross­dressers (Prax­is, 2018). He was short­list­ed for the 2019 Kof­fi Addo Prize for Cre­ative Non-Fic­tion. He is the founder of Sprin­NG, a web-based lit­er­ary move­ment seek­ing to break the bar­ri­ers young cre­ators face in the writ­ing com­mu­ni­ty. He lives in Lagos, where he is hard at work on his nov­el man­u­script. Say hel­lo.