Funto Omojola, If I Gather Here and Shout

 

i carry
i carry sickness into the house. look at the sew er pretending to
know how to wring me look at the sew er pretending to bathe me
look at the sew er pretending to know how many scalpels were
used that day look at the gashes he has made look at the way he
reaches into belly to pull out seeds look at the way he reaches
into belly to pull out seeds look at the way he cleans it look at the
seams he has made here and here. look at the way he seems look
at the way he seams look at the sew erlookat his disciples lookat
his disciples look at the way they seamlook at their nails look at
their calves the way they run in
tandem through villages that palm and palm and palm have
touched look at their nails metals
against
look at their mouths the way they spit out lookat the way they lick
their lips and grin and dive intolook at the way they’re book look at
their mouths the way they untidy and spread

From New York-based Nigerian-American writer, performer and visual artist Funto Omojola comes the full-length debut, If I Gather Here and Shout (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2024). If I Gather Here and Shout holds a single, extended prose-lyric, the book-length poem “Ceremony,” which makes for a titled work made up of a differently titled work, almost as a box within a box, as though the poem itself too big to be contained within a single framework. “what is this tumbling place where only i am center unmoving?” Omojola writes, early on in the collection, to open one of multiple poems titled “Fig.,” “what / is this tumbling stage around me and around me where there are / jesters and sticks curved toward my chest?” Each “Fig.” piece offers a scene, another step, across a narrative arc of swell and plague, illness and joy and resistance and beauty, writing history and family, present tense and the tensions of history that ripple across decades. “say body enter machine,” writes a further “Fig.,” “cold. how many worms per square inch how many square inches / per worm entering machine, cold also? say girl body into machine, / lungs. how many worms legless hurdling toward machine, / lungs also?”

The poems are rhythmic, propulsive, pushing at and against medical crises and systematic violence across a prose-lyric staggered into clusters, each cluster delineated by the modesty of a single, black page. Omojola works through spirit and machine, the body and its limitations, and the complications of seeking intervention through the medical system, family, faith, articulating the collisions between collective and the self. “the urgency precludes and i am an open mouth screaming: an / open mouth screaming: an open stomach screaming through / machine,” writes another “Fig.” Omojola writes through song and swell, rhythmic beats and pulse. “i am saline leaking out of mouth,” a further “Fig.” writes, “component of a child’s destiny. if you cannot make a picture of a / spear, you cannot make a picture of hunger. if you cannot make / a picture of hunger, you cannot make a picture of seep. alert the / guards who hold needles: the girl with the long tongue who hides / peel between front teeth is here. adorn me with robes of men cast in / robes of kings.”