Ava Adelaja’s poem was a finalist for the 2025 Nassau Weekly Poetry Competition. 

SURROGATE

For Pamela (Mimi)

I.

Her hair’s somewhat intact, ruddy clumps on the skin, hanging

like the sanguine bush-berries you’re not supposed to eat,

tempting. I fixate on that ‘cause her voice has fallen to a register

that quite cools my blood — every now and then, the croak

evolves into something tenorous, mostly on the harder vowels, hello

you but all other times, it’s a pendulum between a whisper

and a choke, and I can almost taste the chockery dancing

‘round her lungs. At some point, though, I start whispering too,

and she laughs, or convulses, a sandpaper sort of rhythm,

because the whole ordeal, to a bystander, at least, has begun to sound

quite morbid — corpses shuffling secrets through soil — and that wasn’t

the point of this. She wrests my hands, I think to say, speak

how I remember, and an image opens up to me pure as crystal

in the air: how her fingers, threaded now in a haunting blue, are cold

like memory, ‘frigid hands, warm heart,’ that was her anthem,

and the full of swing of red she had, suburban magic, how she drove

so slow the cops’d accompany us home. And how, in her home,

the pill-box of a place, I’d prance the hardwood, letting my toes flinch

each relevé of cold, just to press on her cheeks, babyish as I could be

at a decade’s age, to hear her repetition, my own bid at heaven,

that warmth wasn’t something that could come alone. Tell me about

yourself, gargled with blood, and I realize I’m nothing new.

II.

I tell her how I’m no longer living in the present, and list, in adagio,

all the things I miss. My father, the White corolla, Ruby Tuesdays,

Church Road before they cut the highway through it. Her

dog, a bitch and mean, but the fun of messing with it, our

piano-player, the specks of fork-silver in his sad attempt at a beard,

and the way, like a swan song, he’d dilute all the supine guilt

the sermon had stirred up, evangelize our resent, and his

children before they nestled away in grief. Afternoons with her after

camp on the bay, camp on the bay, the bay, swimming in the bay,

knowing how to swim, not fearing it, the White corolla,

my father. It returns to the first, in adagio, she smiles, says that was a special time,

and I can see the bow knotting in the air, pulled taut as quickly

as it unraveled. Her eyes have found something peripheral to puzzle

on, satiated, I suppose, with me. This wasn’t what this was

supposed to be, but I feel I have to put my stake in her. So many gone

things. And just like the hardwood had fallen to the corners of my mind,

so would she — cancer, clumps, warm heart, and all. The room

has become a bit of a Babel, and she’s nodding at invisible words,

so I say yes it was special, the crystal image of it

clear in my mind: the blood-stone church ‘round the curving road,

and the gravel like a knife, and all of us rushing forward, dew

to a pearl-rimmed drain, black-tied in the guilt of it; yes, the raw

guilt of it, singing hymns even the almost-dead would never hear.