Tongue-Tied
Treacherous towel—
thick root in a cavern of teeth,
you curled on yourself like a
serpent who forgot its own venom.
Pink cowardly organ—
pressed flat against the roof
of your master’s mouths.
You have gone slack
at every open moment—
that time someone professes love,
at the boardroom table,
when the idea was sitting right there.
You have lain warm and still
while the words
stacked up behind you
like stones.
There’ll be a day, surely—
When I roll you forward
like a boulder from a sealed door.
When every consonant you swallowed
finally breaks free of your cowardice.
There’ll be another day.
When you remember
you were made for the hard
click of truths you try to avoid.
There’ll be another day.
When you uncoil your wet and ancient length
and split the air like a whip finally cracked.
There’ll be another day.
You have won today.
I have bitten back into silence, yet again.
There’ll be another day.
Forget that I’ll return to it. Let’s do that analysis that you do.
Yéyé’s Looking Glass
In the cracked reflection of Yéyé’s looking glass—
I learn the body has curves and cracks,
hips husked open, agbado splitting stalk from stalk,
breasts bulging round as calabash—cala—bash—moulding,
hollow, held, holding.
Yéyé spits bitter kola,
clicks awake the crackling bowl.
A woman is like a clay pot she says—
once cracked, never whole.
Her eyes weigh me. A tuber on a scale.
The reflection splits,
two bodies where one should be—
The long languid limbs of my mother’s people
snake through the seam,
wrap, warp, weave into me,
around me, over me
this is not the first time a girl
has stood before this glass
and watched herself divide.
There was Aminat,
who came with her wanting and left with her wound.
Before Aminat, Ralia,
who asked to see herself whole but saw otherwise.
The names go back like beads on a wire with no end.
Yéyé’s glass does not stay silent.
She crack-crackles awake,
splitting light across my face.
I have witn—essed generations before you, she carves.
All who enter ask the same question,
and all who leave carry the same scar.
the pot that cracks
does not stop holding water.
Alas—
the crack is where the fingers grip.
where the passion leaks through.
where the fire hardens.
Every woman in this lineage
cracked and carried.
Cracked and carried on.
Salmah Salam Oiza
Salmah Salam Oiza is a Nigerian writer based in Birmingham, UK. Her debut poetry pamphlet Foreign in a Long Familiar Leap Year (Salmah Press, 2025) won the African Laureate Award for Best Poetry Collection 2026. She is a BERG Reader at The Emma Press and a Curator of the Birmingham Global Shapers Hub, an initiative of the World Economic Forum. She is at work on her debut novel.
