LINE LEVEL #14
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 “Ode to Memory,” by Abdulrazaq Salihu, whose chapbook, Quantum Entanglements with Notes on Loss, will be published by Sundress Press in 2025.
Ode to memory.
At our first date you sought signs
Of a bloodbath in my eyes.
Other than love, nothing
Had the guts to rest in the glimmer
Of my eyes. Your lips have exhausted
Their light to lick at my wound.
There was a part of the moon
In our wine cups. There was memory
Of a gazan massacre on the softness
Of our steaks. Outside in the pretense of calmness,
Namenj’s sai watarana syncs with the night.
Reflection was our way
of kissing the things we never have
To reach. We hid our tongues
Under each other’s mouth.
Your teeth is a sunflower in the meadow.
Your gold tooth is a treasure in the Nile.
I know every borderline on your skin,
And I know where you close yourself like a wither
In a leaf. Smiles toppled in the indigo of lights
We moved into a song at the mouth of timelessness
Music is a gateway bud in the arm of desperation
I like how you smell of neatly cut lemongrass
I like how we kiss without the touching of our deaths
Contributor’s Note // Abdulrazaq Salihu
I have always been fascinated by how memories are made, kept, and forgotten—and how they connect, directly or not, to our experiences. In my poem,” Ode to Memory,” I dared to create a reality I’ve never lived. I didn’t just paint a picture but sought to evoke the mood of that existence, blending reality, imagination, and empathy to explore how the human condition succumbs to memory.
Through subtle interrogation, I wrote the poem as a series of commands, inducing urgency and completeness. Yet, in the end, there are no conclusions—only open doors of questions. Lines like “there was memory of a Gazan massacre on the softness of our steaks,” “your lips have exhausted their light to lick at my wound,” and “I like how we kiss without the touching of our deaths” open alternate realities where survival, not living, becomes the only option.
This poem experiments with weak noun-active verb pairings (e.g., “we hid our tongues under each other’s mouth”) to craft delicate moods, while active noun-weak verb pairings (e.g., “smiles toppled in the indigo of lights”) explore fresh language textures. In the end, the poem finds love, sadness, and comfort, as every poem should—kissing despair without touching reality.
Craft Lessons from Poets of Color // Joanna Acevedo
In Abdulrazaq Salihu’s poem, “Ode to Memory,” Salihu “experiments,”—his term, not mine—and creates alternate realties, going beyond his own experiences and engaging with possible experiences that are depicted in poetic form but which he has imagined and created from language, instead of reporting facts and details that are direct retellings of events from his own life. Modern poetry, for the most part, is not so brazen in admitting this kind of maneuvering, although poets do it all the time. Retelling stories or diving into existing narratives of all kinds and changing details or trying to imagine past events in a new and modern way is a common practice in poetry—think of Alice Oswald’s Memorial, Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, Jenny Xie’s The Rupture Tense, or Marianne Chan’s Leaving Biddle City, just to name a few recent examples.
Even with these kinds of titles as proof that poetry is much more than a way for people to express explosive emotion, or a technique of spoken word with political motivation and no other use, but instead is a craft itself with much more to give than what you learn in high school English class, the confessional model of poetry still dominates the cultural consciousness. Writers like Sylvia Plath continue to limit the way that the public views poetry as an art form. Plath’s work has merit, but her famous death overshadows her work, and the tradition she helped to popularize has meant that poetry is often victim to oversimplication. In Richard Siken’s 2024 interview with BOMB, he speaks of this phenomenon in more detail:
In fiction, we can easily make the distinction between author and speaker. In poetry, we often conflate the two. We all do. I do it too.
He continues:
People wanted to know if it was true. Not just the accuracy or the honesty—they also wanted to know the name of the dead boyfriend. I was uncomfortable with handing out all-access passes.
As readers, the first person narrator is supposedly trustworthy. The idea that a first person narrator can deceive the reader or provide false information is a relatively new idea. Although a first person narrator may be limited in the way they can perceive, they are usually assumed to be honest in their awareness and ability to deliver information to the reader.
Salihu’s experiments are bound in language, but the idea of memory-formation is the question that drives the poem. The poem is essentially blurring the genre lines as it depicts a set of experiences that have not happened. It’s a fictional account of this relationship, a hybrid creation initiated by language manipulation and the way memories are brought to the surface by small shifts and minute detail.
***
Anyone who watches crime procedurals—Criminal Minds, Law & Order, NCIS, even Dexter—knows that law enforcement, from police all the way to the FBI, often asks witnesses of the crimes they investigate to do a kind of interview that asks them to focus on the tiny details, and those details are often what break the case. Memories can be triggered by unexpected sources, including smells and sounds and other random events.
In this poem, Salihu is focusing on this concept. The details are front and center: “gold tooth,” and “indigo of lights.” But Salihu goes further, and the pairings of images are unexpected, setting the reader on edge—we see “softness of our steaks,” and “bloodbath in my eyes.” These are the moments that alert us as a reader that there may be more to this poem than originally guessed. It’s these details and pairings that create the unrest woven into the poem’s foundation, subtly and almost subconsciously alerting the reader to its deception and fictional elements.
The poem is not an “ode,” as the title suggests. Rather, it’s an exploration of what can be accomplished with language. The title is misleading and this is a part of the question that Salihu is asking as well. He’s not writing a poem praising memory in an elemental sense. Instead, he is trying to see if he can create memories out of thin air. He admires memory, perhaps, values its power, is fascinated by its effect, and he is seeking control as an artist to manipulate his craft to express an authentic version of these influential expressions that he has witnessed in others and felt in his own life. There are clues to Salihu’s intent and his experimental motivations hidden throughout this work, but without close and careful reading, the casual reader may skim the poem and leave the poetic space with an ambiguous sense of unrest.
This isn’t a critique. Salihu’s approach is curious and clever. The depth of his inquiry gives way to a new kind of exploration, and shows us the many different levels we can consider our own poems, from the very simple to the very complex. The questions we ask are the foundation of our poetic practice. As working writers, we never stop questioning and we never stop learning.
Abdulrazaq Salihu, TPC I, is a Nigerian Writer and Performance Poet. A member of the Hilltop Creative Arts Foundation, he has Received Residency from IWE Nigeria, Frances Thompson Writers studio and is a 2025 Fellow at the LOATAD Black Atlantis. He won the Masks Poetry Award, LAP performance poetry prize, SOD, BKPW and Poetry Archive contest. He’s the author of “Constellations” and “Hiccups” and has his chapbook “Quantum entanglements with notes on loss” forthcoming with Sundress Publication 2025. He has is works Published/Forthcoming with Uncanny, Bacopa Mag, Strange Horizons, Stachion, Consequence, SofloPojo, Bracken, Poetry Quarterly and elsewhere, He tweets @Arazaqsalihu and instagram: abdulrazaq._salihu
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/.
