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  • What Remains after My Grandmother’s Death
  • Rasaq Malik (bio)

In her room that remains unopenedafter her death, there are old clotheson the sofa, her earrings on the tablethat doubles as a space where her mugs live,passing through the hands of visitors whenshe was alive.

Now there are no visitors to knock on herdoor nor enter her room to share fromher abundant generosity, from herpiousness and devotion to Allah,to children walking past her windowon evenings when she sat by the windowto see the world racing likewind while time hurries downthe path of memory.

Now there is no one to enter her room to stretch her bed sheets,to read the Qur’an beneath her pillow, to wipe the dustoff her frames of pictures that sit at the corners of her room,to scrub her windowpanes, to arrange her scattered pictures,to wash the dirty aprons and discard the clothes of onionsthat remain unpicked on the kitchen floor.

Nothing remains except the vases of flowers droppedby mourners on her tomb, the testaments of vanished [End Page 101] moments, the hollows that fill her room, the memoriesof spent nights in solitude, the ephemeral cycle of life,the inevitability of death that shortens our longline of dreams. [End Page 102]

Rasaq Malik

Rasaq Malik is a graduate of the University of Ibadan. His poems have been published in Rattle, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. He was shortlisted for the Brunel International African Poetry Prize in 2017. He was a finalist for the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets in 2018.

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