Deonte Osayande
Two Poems
Baptized in Fire
My dad wrote
my mom
love poems
in letters
before
they were married,
& I looked for them
after he was cremated
but they didn’t survive
the fire from when I was
just a boy
obsessed
with playing
video games.
Pups aka Baby Sharks
Sharks migratory patterns were changed because these predators followed the ships in the Middle Passage because when a slave died they were thrown overboard, or if they were killed because they were protesting, or if they committed suicide, the sharks knew that they could follow the ships, and it changed the migratory patterns of sharks during this period of time.
—Donald M. Payne
I get to thinking
about baby sharks,
pups, who like dogs
instinctively follow
where their meals
originate from
on the middle passage,
or the cops
spraying hoses
on us & sending
their hounds
who have been trained
to think of our flesh as food,
without consideration
of how we even became nourishment
for their hungry, ravenous aptitudes
& wondering
if they even think
of us as well
—Submitted on 11/10/2020
Deonte Osayande is a writer from Detroit, Mich. His books include Class (Urban Farmhouse Press, 2017), Circus (Brick Mantle Books, 2018) and Civilian (Urban Farmhouse Press, 2019. His poems appear in Button Poetry and other journals. Osayande has represented Detroit at four National Poetry Slam competitions. Manager of the Rustbelt Midwest Regional Poetry Slam and Festival for 2014 and 2018, he is a professor of English at Wayne County Community College.
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