January has been teaching me
that hurt can come from even the most comforting spaces.
I’m reminded you are still
a smart, beautiful, confused, selfish, foolish, caring boy
I love who has no desire to learn
to love me back in my love language.
I miss the boy you used to be;
insecurity and fear leaves my body and comes back homeless.
Wednesday evening we talk about news trending in Accra,
how it’s the only thing that resembles home
but is still incapable of loving wholeheartedly,
and reasons why I think you’re full of shit sometimes.
We talk about your day and my day and everything
but how you and the city are breaking my heart.
After minutes of silence, you ask what I’m thinking,
and I smile and say nothing.
Of the time we kissed
how you melted in my mouth.
It’s like taking a gun to a swordfight, it’s not fair.
I need to find a way to stop dying my way into my own poems.
Our love is a unfinished poem.
You dish out I-love-you’s like there’s a famine in your throat
and you have to ration them.
What’s the English word for someone who still has hope
in lovers who cause too much anxiety?
Tell me so I can spit it out.
I left my vulnerability in the mouth of a nerdy boy and I want it back.

About Ama Diaka

Poetra Asantewa is writer and a poet based in Accra. Her work, both as a performer and a writer engages issues of becoming, feminism, in- equality, womanhood and mental health in her community. She has participated in internationally acclaimed workshops organised by Fem- rite (2013) and Farfina Trust (2016) and was the first Poet to be selected as a OneBeat 2016 fellow.

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