Yellowcake

There in your kitchen, we crack brown eggs over your sink.
Hushed, we redefine our childhood legends.

Yoruba tales whisper about the cunning tortoise who would listen 
to the meeting of the birds and make a feathered shell with his own two hands.

Rubbed raw and pink in Jerusalem bathwater.
Or—no. Maybe not Jerusalem. Maybe Ilé-Ifẹ̀.

Maybe it’s the same water your mum flicks 
at us after clearing your father’s plate.

Or the same water my father pours into the cooking pot.
Boiling warm Sunday-night akara special
while I soften the beans for the moin-moin.

But we’re here. Not the barnhouse, not the cradle.
But your kitchen in the dark night,
incense sputtering over the basin, lavender fog heavy.

You pour the eggs into the bowl. And I lick the flour off my thumb.
Eyebrows furrowed, I remember that
you and I have the same hair.

My uncle would be a painter and he would play a shekere.
He would kiss his son on the forehead.
He would soak his buka stew and dice the vegetables
without looking at his hands.

Watch Jesus forgive the world for its every trespass.
Forgive the world for killing him raw and tender—
And still he would feed them.

We have to whisk because your baby brother is asleep so 
we sit on the counter and whisk until our hands fall off
and smack down into the bowls.

On the seventh day, God made a cake and he served it 
with our wrist bones still inside it.

Because the only way to eat is together
and the old stories were always about us.

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Tunmise Adebowale is a Nigerian-born New Zealander currently studying at the University of Otago. She’s the winner of the 2023 Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook student competition in the Year 13 category, and the 2023 Sargeson Short Story Award for the secondary schools division. Her work has been published in Pantograph Punch, Turbine | Kapohau, Newsroom, NZ Poetry Shelf, and Verb Wellington. You can find her on Substack: https://oizystunmise.substack.com/.