A 21-Step Guide to Self-Love 

you broke my heart so you should give me yours

          -Naomi Sharon 

1. filter the petrichor from the air
2. sift the stillness from the arrival of rain 
3. leave its drops to patter against your roof
4. behold the cuckoos preening their feathers by your window
5. listen for the music your body makes with the whispers of the wind 
6. stretch the perforations on your thick skin wide enough to house your hands 
7. reach under your muscles and gather every bone you’ve wanted to pick with him
8. trace the track of your tendons with your fingers
9. pull them till they snap your body back into wakefulness 
10. demand for what once filled that chest with melodies
11. ask for each finger that has reached to squeeze your wholeness, 
12. rearrange the Brandy albums that kept you awake when the whole world tasted death
13. pluck out the metaphors etched in the little poems you squeezed into the crevices of his eyes
14. request for the rabbit in the moon he promised to help you catch 
15. return the shadows he drowned in your darkness on nights only the stars smiled
16. dissect his noise from your voice
17. empty out the dessicated wings in your belly
18. launder his sweat and promises and cologne and sap and hair and blood from your linen
19. flatten out the tension he planted on the surface of your cheeks
20. distill the tenderness you gifted him and inject it in your veins
21. lie on your back and let the crimson in you flow again

Taiwo Hassan

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Taiwo Hassan is a poet, singer, and writer of Yorubá descent. Their poems have been published in Uncanny Magazine, trampset, Kissing Dynamite, Lucent Dreaming, The Shore, Brittle Paper, Dust Poetry Magazine, Ice Floe Press, Wizards In Space, and several other journals. My poetry explores themes of family, identity, love, loss, and womanhood. As a poet, they strive to craft works that illuminate the issues associated with living as a queer person and a Nigerian.

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