Two Poems | Oluwanifemi Bakare

Cover Image by Nsikan Abasi

When I Said I Was a Mirror, You Said Clean Yourself First

dear evening,
i’ve worn my skin so long the label’s faded.
you know, the part where it says
handwash gently, don’t expose to loud questions.
today, i walked past a pastor screaming deliverance!
& thought he meant me.

my voice came out of me like a thief,
didn’t knock, didn’t wipe its feet.
just left shame fingerprints all over my breath.
& i—
i still stammer in lowercase.
sometimes not at all.

the mirror in my mother’s room
told me i look like someone trying not to exist too loudly.
but even silence has a gender, doesn’t it?
mine slips.
not into dresses,
just away from your assumptions.
pronouns like potholes—
i keep falling into myself.

i once said i feel like rain.
you said:
but rain ruins weddings.
so i dried up.
became air.
took the shape of whatever glass you poured me into.
until i cracked the cup.

i came out
not with a banner,
but a body
that twitches
when too many eyes hold it.

i came out
not as rainbow,
but a riddle
with too many wrong answers.

i came out
alone,
to myself,
in a room full of people
who thought they already knew me.

someone said
you don’t act gay enough to be gay,
as if queerness is a TikTok filter
& not the reason i flinch
when God is used like a belt.
as if neurodivergence isn’t already a second coming out—
stop being dramatic
they say.
as if it’s not drama to survive in a world
that forgets you
on purpose.

dear girl on my street who smiles like dawn,
i told you my heart hums in puzzles.
you called it broken.
so i locked the pieces back into my ribcage
& swallowed the key.
no one ever teaches you
that softness is a currency
you’re not allowed to spend.

some days,
i dress like noise,
let my wrists speak in bracelets.
some days,
i am a locked room.
others,
i leave the door ajar & hope someone sees the dust
& still calls it beautiful.

because this—
this is the part of coming out no one writes about.
the quiet rot.
the tiny betrayals.
the way your name echoes differently
after you say i’m not who you thought i was.

i tried to write a poem about joy.
i ended up here instead.
but maybe this
is also joy—
to be able to bleed
& still call it a song.

What We Lost in the Mouth of That Evening

i came out once
with your name stuck in my throat.
not as lover, not as man,
just a boy who knew too much about silence
& how it rearranges your insides.

when people ask how i knew i was different,
i tell them about the way my hands
learned to shake before they ever learned to hold.
but what i really mean is:
you kissed me like a revelation
& i shattered like scripture.

you—
you were the poem that made me think
maybe my stutter was holy.
maybe god had a lisp too.
maybe love was just the way your eyes
undressed me without touching
the wounds.

but entropy eats everything.
you left.
not in a blaze.
in the quiet.
like dusk.
like music fading while the body still dances.

now i only write.
& write.
& write.
as if a metaphor could kiss me back.
as if similes can stitch the ghost of your lips
into the curve of my notebook.
i tell people i don’t date anymore—
too busy. too broken. too boy.

but the truth is
i kissed my muse
& lost the language.

they say identity is a river.
mine is a flood.
sometimes i think if i come out one more time
there won’t be anything left to return to.

once,

i wore a shirt that said i am still becoming.
nobody said anything.
but the man beside me on the danfo
kept staring like he knew something
i hadn’t figured out yet.
i turned to the window,
counted trees,
pretended the road outside was more interesting
than the boy unraveling in my chest that I didn’t care too much about.

but you did.
at least, i think you did.
in the soft way you said my name.
in the text you sent at 1:47am that said
i like the way you listen to the world.
i saved it.
it’s still in my notes app, next to these lines.

so, when i say coming out,
i don’t just mean the brave kind.
i mean the falling apart kind.
the loving-then-breaking kind.
the becoming-empty-but-trying-again kind.

because what no one tells you is:
to love in this body,
with this brain,
with this silence
that sometimes forgets to speak—
is to hold your truth like a matchstick in the rain
& still try to write fire.
& you—
you were the fire.
now i carry the smoke.