LINE LEVEL #9

By Joanna Acevedo | August 19, 2024

Welcome to LINE LEVEL: Craft Lessons from Poets of Color, a monthly column in which writer, editor, and educator Joanna Acevedo zooms in on an element of craft from the work of BIPOC poets. LINE LEVEL unfolds in three parts: an excerpt of a poem, followed by a contributor’s note, followed by Acevedo’s own exploration into the poet’s world of language. Guided by a curiosity that yields learning, we are invited to consider historical context, stylistic influences, and more, all the way down to the level of the line. This month, Acevedo discusses “Two Truths & A Lie,” from Autobiomythography Of (Alice James, 2024) by Ayokunle Falomo.

TWO TRUTHS & A LIE

after Chris Abani, with thanks to Bill Moran

My father loves me. I am my father’s
Son. I am my father’s first son. My father is
The only son of his father. I do not know
Much about my father. I know a lot about
My father. My father is a myth. He is
A sculpted ghost with marble wings. I have
My father’s smile. He likes to smile in pictures
As much as I like taking selfies. My father
Does not like taking pictures. As a boy, I did
Not smile in pictures. No pictures exist of my father
As a boy. My father is no myth. My father was
Once a boy. I am afraid to ask my father
If he remembers—what he remembers
About—being a boy. My father is a god.
He’s Zeus to be precise. Translated, my middle
Name means my God has arrived. My father is
A quiet man. My father’s silence is loud
Sometimes. My father is an angel. My father is not
A lawyer. Lawyers are very good liars, I’ve heard.
Poets too, if I’m honest. My father once wanted to be
A lawyer. My father knows a lot. He knows a lot
About history, the history of his country. I don’t
Remember much. My father’s middle name,
Translated, means God remembers. My father
Was once a teacher. My mother was a nurse.
For 30 years, my father was a psychiatric nurse.
My father is a correctional officer. My mother is
A nurse. When I was a boy, my father tended to
A garden. My father tilled the earth as a boy. I am
Jealous of everything my father has ever planted.
In Oke Opo, we lived in a very small compound.
In Bolorunduro, we raised goats & chickens &
Rabbits & pigs. My mother does not like pork.
The pigs were well-fed. They made yo mama so fat
Jokes about each other. Come Christmastime, we’d
Kill them. My mother loves cooking. She doesn’t
Mind cooking pork. I’ve never killed anything.
I’m lying. I killed a chicken once. Or twice. Once,

Or twice, I’ve held a rat in my hand & did not kill it.
Instead, I let it go. I felt like God. I have a hard time
Letting things go. People too. When I was a boy,
My father & I did not see eye to eye. My eyes
Are often red. I have trouble with sleeping: staying
Asleep & also staying awake. My favorite color
Is red. My mother’s is brown. My father’s is blue.
When I was a boy, my mother did not have a car.
My father had a red Volkswagen Jetta. He drove it
Before I was born, until we both left my mother
And siblings for a new country. Sometimes, I wish
We didn’t. I’m glad we did. I remember, before they
Stopped, the family trips we’d take. When I was still a baby,
My mother left. Left me. Briefly. With my father. I remember
My mother in labor, inside my father’s car. My mother still
Experiences labor pains sometimes. I remember the ride to
The hospital. Which of my siblings she was pregnant with,
I do not remember. I’m lying. It was my sister. I remember
Carrying each of my siblings. I remember feeding them.
I remember changing their cloth diapers. I remember
Washing each soiled diaper, by hand. I am a father
Now. I stole my siblings’ baby food. Milk, sugar,

Milo and Bournvita too. I was a naughty child. When
I was much younger than I am now, I poured an entire
Tin of Bournvita into a bucket of water. The sun
Was out that day. Lucky enough, my mother didn’t beat
The daylight out of me. My mother has only beaten me
Once. Once, my mother tied me to a bench while she slept.
I untied myself. She cried, when she woke up, because
She couldn’t find me. My father is not the type to cry.
My father’s never laid his hands on my mother, the way
A prophet might on someone in need of deliverance.
My father isn’t much of a disciplinarian. He’d rather
Talk to you than whoop your butt. Once though,
In Bolorunduro, he gave me a beating I’ll never forget.
Welts formed on my skin. There was blood. I had pushed
My brother Ayodele into a wall. His forehead split like
An atom. It was an accident. We were running outside
In the backyard. My mother sutured the wound. Once,
My mother cut me with a razor. I have scars. Once,
My half sister poured hot water on herself. She has a scar
On one side of her face. My father once fell from a mountain
Bike. He has a huge scar on one of his knees. Right or left,
I don’t remember. My father loves me. I am my father’s
Son. I am my mother’s first son. My father is his father’s.

Contributor’s Note // Ayokunle Falomo

Here’s a confession: I started my writing journey as a fiction writer. Here’s another: for a few years now, I’ve been wrestling with what to do with the burden of confession and its demands. I confess that I, too, have considered the page—and, at times, the stage—my priest. Whatever form or shape the poem assumed, it was a confessional. I confess that I have confessed things in poems that I wouldn’t necessarily want my father to know about me, or himself for that matter.

It is true that poems offer us a means to speak about the hard truths of our lives, for which I’m eternally grateful, but I have been longing for a return to the pure joy of imagining, of making shit up, as I did when I was 6. There was, then, something delightful about bringing to life a world that did not exist before. This is what is exciting about metaphors: how they embody a lie and a truth simultaneously. There is a scarcity of metaphors in this poem, yes, intentionally so, but I wanted to see what it would look like to boldly say a not-true thing as if it were, which is precisely what a metaphor is: a not-true thing that is true. I mean, is a half-truth a lie or a truth? I mean, how else to tell you who my father is except to say he is exactly what he is: a sculpted ghost with marble wings.

There are things that will forever remain difficult to admit—to oneself, or out loud. Facts be damned, a poem is, I think, a space to attempt to tell all the Truth, albeit slant, as Dickinson puts it. Though I am aware that my memory is untrustworthy, I know what’s true in the poem and I know what’s not, whether or not the facts hold up. I love, too, that the reader will never truly know, though they might have—or be convinced they have—the facts. There is, for me, a freedom in that. Mischievous as it might be, it is the kind of freedom, and reckless glee, I want for every poem. Mine, surely. But yours, too. Yours too.

Craft Lessons from Poets of Color //  Joanna Acevedo

Ayokunle Falomo, author of Autobiomythography Of (forthcoming from Alice James in September, 2024) raises some excellent questions about the function of metaphor and confession in his poem, “Two Truths & A Lie.” Poetry is one of those slippery creatures in that we expect it to contain truths, since it often begins with a first person, “I,” narrator, but there’s really no way to confirm that the poet is telling the story the way it actually happened, and as we know, there can be competing versions of how an event actually went down. The truth, conceptually, is a fraught and contested territory. Adding imagery or sensory detail, like many poets do, and a concept as fickle as metaphor on top of it all, is a surefire way to get caught in the middle, tangled in the threads of memory, language, culpability, and intent. 

The craft of this particular poem distracts us from what Falomo states quite clearly is his conceptual interest. The title, “Two Truths & A Lie,” alerts readers that we’re going to mess with the truth in some way, but there are many more than two truths in this poem, and probably more than one lie, as well. But his repetition and rhythm sway us away from this and we are lulled, then captivated, by the poem itself. We’re distracted. The poem, at times, is emotionally challenging, and as it progresses, we need to focus on this, the escalation of confessions that Falomo makes, and whether or not they are representing truth, a certain kind of remembered truth that defines his complex relationship to his father and his memories of childhood. 

Metaphor becomes the vehicle for emotion, a safer way to explore these complicated and often conflicting feelings. As Falomo says, “… precisely what a metaphor is: a not-true thing that is true.” This is the tension of the poem, even if we aren’t aware of it as readers. This split between the truth, the half-truth, and the lies, it brews in the fissures of the poem and in Falomo’s contradictions, it creates the momentum of the immediate and urgent moment that we feel, experience, remember and respond to, all at once.  

This “confessional,” poetry that Falomo dominates the poetry sphere today, and we’re all  comfortable with assuming that the narrator of a poem is the author themselves, but this is not always the case. Although poets like Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton shocked the world in the 1950s and 60s with their incredibly personal work, in the modern day it often seems like we’re all trying to outdo each other with what we tell the public. In recent years, however, there have been a number of literary trends which signal a slight shift away from this particular attitude and ethos surrounding the purpose of poetry as a method of communication. 

Books such as Jenny Xie’s The Rupture Tense (Graywolf, 2022), which engages with the history of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, or Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red (Knopf, 1998), a retelling of a Herakles myth, or even Noor Naga’s If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English (Graywolf, 2022), a novel in verse which describes an American girl meeting an Egyptian man in Cairo, all handle this idea of truth in different ways. The later two are prose poetry, but each book takes a new stance on narrative—and they all resonate with Falomo’s confession about coming to poetry as a fiction writer. The further one explores, the more clear it becomes that genre is a wall that can be broken down if one is interested in breaking it.

Poetry limited by the scope of what is true is boring poetry. There’s no rule that everything that a poet has to be fact-checked. Think bigger. It’s the emotion that floats up from beneath the lines that must be true, and this comes from the poet themselves; it will happen regardless of the approach, as long as the poet is dedicated, thoughtful, and engaged with their own work. This is the magic of poetry, this essential connection baked into the foundation. 

Falomo’s work fits into this new trend of blurring genre—in recent years we have seen more cross-genre work, from authors like R.F. Kuang, the sci-fi writer who wrote the recent and acclaimed Yellowface (HarperCollins, 2023), to Kaveh Akbar, whose debut novel MARTYR! (Doubleday, 2024) released earlier this year; Akbar previously was known only as a poet. Ocean Vuong, author of novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, (Penguin, 2019) primarily known as a poet, is another great example of this; he’s also written essays for outlets like The Rumpus. 

In the poetry of the last few years, we see authors like Marianne Chan, with Leaving Biddle City (Sarabande, 2024) begin to push these same kinds of boundaries between truth and lies; her forthcoming book is centered around a fake family that somewhat resembles her own, and a false suburb, Biddle City. She uses these metaphors to talk about her experience growing up as a Filipino immigrant in the US. Arthur Kayzakian’s The Book of Redacted Paintings (Black Lawrence Press, 2023) handles similar questions of memory, immigration, and truth.

Falomo is exploring these same kinds of questions of family and legacy, and perhaps it is these subjects, wracked with concerns about memory and differing accounts from various family members that bring us instinctively into this space. When we look outwards we see the way that the world shapes us, but its the lies that we tell ourselves that are the most tightly held, and these are the ones that Falomo is working with. Metaphor then becomes a tool—a way to filter the truth, mold and shape it. What we discover with metaphor as a sieve for the truth might not be what we expect and it might not even be true in the way we’re looking for, but it’s a step forward, towards understanding the self, if such a thing even exists.

Joanna Acevedo

Joanna Acevedo is the Editor in Chief of Frontier Poetry. She is the author of three books and two chapbooks, and her writing in multiple genres can be found across the web and in print, most recently (or forthcoming) in The North American Review, Hunger Mountain, and Cream City Review. Nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart Prizes, she teaches workshops and creates resources for emerging writers on numerous platforms, receiving  her MFA from NYU in 2021. She also holds degrees from Bard College and the New School. To learn more about her and her work, please visit her at https://www.joannaacevedo.net/.