Iowa, with Love

by Adedayo Agarau

This city owes me audacity. We were drinking in a bar downtown,

laughing at the hockey players gnarling at one another over a tiny ball sliding over ice

& over the clink of glasses, which we do each time they hit into one another on the TV.

We talked about poems, about the houses downtown, that the cost of living here is not

Money, it’s loneliness. You told me of the guy who kissed you at a bar downtown

on a Thursday evening, after a date at Uncle Sun, where ies hovered over the dips, & the

nonchalance of their waitpeople. You said he said sorry afterward as if his desire toward you was a mistake.

“I know a thing or two about mistakes,” I say,” coming here, for instance, means thinking that only

poems can open the world to us. That this country is a dream passing, we shouldn't stay and shouldn’t

dream of staying.” A man, almost past his prime, wearing a yellow, black Iowa Hockey jersey,

with a cup of beer in his hand, suddenly chipped in and asked where we were from.

I said, “Iowa, the Iowa Writers Workshop.” A line of dissatisfaction wrote itself on his face.

“I mean, where are you originally from,” he responded, almost worried about our misfit.

The skull of the antelope on the wall caught my eye. I wondered if it was real.

If they stabbed it with a knife and roasted it dry. If it was synthetic. The man stood, waiting

for an answer, his glass of beer, like a neck, fastened in his hand. He motioned his cup to arrive at

the parallel of his throat, almost pretending to sip. I nally say, “we are Nigerians.”

“Yorubas,” I added to avoid him misplacing us on our map. Two childhood friends in the writers' workshop,

in the hands of a ferocious city, its people unkind in the tone of their question, the desperation

of their desires. How he looked at you, almost with the intensity of body set ablaze, how he must have thought

he could, for the night, toss you over and wear you in, unwrapped. Later, he sat beside us.

What the body makes the worst of us do. Laughed with us as we laughed at the men on TV fighting

over a puck sliding over ice. Said something about hating hockey because we said we don’t understand

the rage, and the violence of American sports. The night went on, passing batons over to drunkenness &

in a corner, two men are kissing in front of a girl. We did not notice that man’s silent disappearance.