Divination

by Tolu Oloruntoba

I was a misattribution at my physician’s desk:
a false oath. Patients thought me an oracle

in those rooms. I had fled from a Cronus
that would puppet me. I would flee again.

I was too warm behind the masquerade,
which Yorùbás say hide the faces of gods.

Another saying: whoever betrays the earth,
will go with it. Legend told of traitors swallowed

into sudden-cracked earth, where Anubis
had spliced a lion, a crocodile, a hippopotamus.

Those fates may catch me yet, but I’ve been
slippery. And I did pay some of their due.

Like Ifá’s priests would prescribe a sacrifice—
I gave requisitions for tests; I asked blood

of my supplicants. I fed people into the jaws of MRIs.
I cut things out of them. I stabbed things into them.

I drew people into the world; I cracked their rib cages
as they left it; I put others to sleep, faithful to the guild.

And I listened to the instrument of my divination:
a tablet, not with scrying camwood but formularies;

I repeated the doctrines of prognosis whispered
by the fates. If Macbeth’s Sisters—the lawyer, the doctor,

the engineer—who prescribed their own professions,
find me, I will tell them I left, had had to, to heal myself.

TOLU OLORUNTOBA

is a poet whose debut collection won the Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry in English. He lives in Semiahmoo, Katzie, and Kwantlen territories known as Surrey, B.C. His second collection, Each One a Furnace, is now available from McClelland & Stewart.