One Poem by Ameen Animashaun – Terrain.org

Finger-Painting

Every single thing in this new world
reminds me of all the broken bodies
I abandoned halfway.

               The cricket singing
               glory in the night’s ears
               reminds me of silence.
               Of longing. Of seeking
               without the burden
               of being sought. None
               of the things I want
               out of life know me
               by my first name.

This is the first rule of survival:
we all exist only out of necessity.

Do you hear it, too? The flat tune
playing so low in the background
it could be mistaken
for a prayer.

               How many moments
               make up a lifetime? Faux-Freud
               says the fireflies in my dreams
               are all imaginary.
               How many lifetimes do we need
               to make a single moment?

Wait. This feels so, so wrong.
I fingerpaint the things I want
out of life, but still,
there is a little too much red
               in this equation.

Ameen Animashaun is a poet and essayist. His works have appeared/are forthcoming in Poets.org, Rattle, Salamander, Lolwe, Foglifter, Vast Chasm, and elsewhere. An MFA candidate at Washington University in St. Louis, he is the winner of the 2024 Academy of American Poets Adeline T.M. Graber Poetry Prize, a finalist of the 2024 Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Contest, and the first runner-up of the 2023 Creative Manchester Poetry competition. He is an Oddball; a butterfly.

Header image generated by AI, courtesy Adobe Photoshop.