₴₵ⱧɆⱧɆⱤ₳Ⱬ₳ĐɆ

We met online. She told me stories of good and evil
spirits, of people who would die with and without her, of
synchronicities across disparate groups,
of how she learned she could do what she willed,
I loved that place, I loved that white dress,
she’d try to lie to me but in my dreams I’d see the truth,
I left him waiting for me for hours,
white roses, blood bag of gems,
the waves were in 4K, the water was
clearer than me, I can hear their voices,
before I learned to tune them out I couldn’t sleep,
have you ever been there? for all I know they’re dead now,
the jaguar’s throat, worst night of my life,
I never cried like that before or since, April, I’m so scared,
the fourth time someone used that exact phrase,
that same day, all strangers,
every day I’d wake up sick and pour my sickness in a tree.

₮ⱧɆ ฿₳₮Ⱨ

It’s a dangerous ritual. Esther says without it
she’ll go places I can’t follow. I’m scared
to lose her. She has me sit in a cold bath,
close my eyes and picture everything emptying out,
all my energy, positive and negative, drained away
by the cold water. I have to wait for her
to tell me when it’s done. It takes at least an hour, maybe more.
When Esther comes to get me it’s as though she
breaks a trance, I feel empty as though dead, my legs are weak,
she has to help me leave the tub, I’m wet and shivering
and she places a white towel over my shoulders.
She lays me on the floor in a neutral position.
It’s dark, 8 PM in winter. Esther stands over me
and makes an outline of my body
on the floor in salt.
Near my hands, feet, my head,
she sets white candles. There’s a couple
screaming in the apartment above us. Beyond that
the noise of cars and laughter.
Esther kneels beside me, I focus my eyes on
her face. Don’t move. Don’t speak. Only listen
to my voice. Her hands are on me and they burn.
My declaration. A burning like veins full of flies.
Black rose, white swan. My eyes throb
as I watch her. There is a jade wall.
The pain is thunder.
From this wall I make a door.
Blue sky above us and the moon.
We’re standing in a field of grass
blown by strong icy winds.

₴₳₮ɄⱤ₦

I was lying with Esther in her white bed.
The room was cold. I shivered under the blankets.
Esther turned on a light, blinding white room,
her white bed, the white walls, fluorescent lights,
her clothes on the ground, her jade bracelet on the clothes.
I told her the dreams I’d had since my awakening,
ghosts and evil spirits come to see me in a line,
the first describing a lost and doomed love,
the next describing their undying grief,
the next describing how they were murdered, the next
describing how they’d wanted badly to murder someone else
and failed, the next listing all the sensations they missed
in the land of the living, sun on their skin, salt,
fucking, their naked envy as they watched us fuck, another night
I didn’t dream at all but felt like I was being tossed
among strong currents in a black ocean, tumbling, seeing
nothing, heavy, choking through the night as though dead.
My voice was ragged as I spoke.
I felt a thousand eyes on me. Esther’s eyes
met mine. She held me. In her arms
I felt a chill like water rising around me.

Gabriel Oladipo is a writer and investor living in Chicago. He received his MFA in poetry from Brown University and has published recent poems in Dreginald; Action, Spectacle; and Diagram. He is currently working on expanding these poems (including the poems published here) into a prose novel. You can find him at gabrieloladipo.com.