Throughout the summer, Crab Creek Review will be featuring writers from our archives. Keep an eye out for interviews, past works, and more from past Crab Creek contributors!
New Living Translation
You attract what you fear. And that’s physics.
You spot an unmarked cop car on my street
and that’s residential politics. A body can speak
of safety without ever uttering a word. A kitchen
can hold steam better than that body can, but that’s
chemistry. Homiletical as a way of being. As a junior
usher in the baptist church, I was taught to keep my torso
straight and to never rush. Today, I am in the uber on the way
back from service thinking as I did as a child. Of offerings
and vocation. Sure, it’s the little things but I know better
than that. The driver asks me about my name and we discuss
how it means God has done this and how she had named
her son Onyamachi which means who knows tomorrow.
And as we pull up, I am back on the topic of blessings.
Quadrupled gravity and again it’s physics. How, though
I was never fortunate to grasp my native tongue, I was
taught about subjectivity. Aptitude as a result of choice.
How I would choose the retorts of who grows up to be
a mortician or i want to be a pilot when i grow up
the same: as high as any other claim. Lively and
exuding superlatives. As far as I can tell,
tomorrow may very well be unconditional.
You spot an unmarked cop car on my street
and that’s residential politics. A body can speak
of safety without ever uttering a word. A kitchen
can hold steam better than that body can, but that’s
chemistry. Homiletical as a way of being. As a junior
usher in the baptist church, I was taught to keep my torso
straight and to never rush. Today, I am in the uber on the way
back from service thinking as I did as a child. Of offerings
and vocation. Sure, it’s the little things but I know better
than that. The driver asks me about my name and we discuss
how it means God has done this and how she had named
her son Onyamachi which means who knows tomorrow.
And as we pull up, I am back on the topic of blessings.
Quadrupled gravity and again it’s physics. How, though
I was never fortunate to grasp my native tongue, I was
taught about subjectivity. Aptitude as a result of choice.
How I would choose the retorts of who grows up to be
a mortician or i want to be a pilot when i grow up
the same: as high as any other claim. Lively and
exuding superlatives. As far as I can tell,
tomorrow may very well be unconditional.
Mini Interview with Olatunde Osinaike
You published with Crab Creek Review first in our 2018 fall issue. In it, you described how your experiences are "grounded like lemonade stands...what is sold is sweet and that our motifs and perceptions are really a fragile kind of commerce." How do you reflect on your experiences now and how has this affected your writing?
If I could stay in line with the imagery from before. I mean the commerce is just as fragile, but largely now because of what I am choosing to deconstruct or grapple with about its value. At a lemonade stand, we revel in the exchange of satisfying the desire. That is what we are attuned to, what we are driving toward. I am more concerned now with what is done during the hibernation of those same desires. It is possible to make anything sweet when it is artificial and so I find myself thinking more about the essence of lemons and paying appropriate respect to the ingredients or the origins of what sustains me. When the lemonade stand is down indefinitely and our desire is outstanding, what is it our appetites turn to and how is that governed. In that same vein, I've been thinking often recently about what immediacy can and pushes us to discard and let go of. Obviously, we find ourselves now in a moment of great reclamation, revisiting reform as a means of social inception, so we challenge these larger structures and uplift and uproot traditions with radical love in mind. I want to equip myself with what is enough; it is okay to be without if that is excess.
That being said, I am in a period of pausing to unlearn. I am in the midst of inviting seasons that abolish what I planned for and feel my writing is taking on voice and urgency in a new light. I am writing most about my masculinity and the ways in which I have weaponized it previously while acknowledging how lineage can spill over from just the body to talk of the body. The endeavor of radicalizing community in enveloped happiness, where it brings me no joy to receive a return to sender. I can't settle for the joy of the exchange of language anymore because it is not joy without knowing if that language was received in the right manner, in a just way.
What has influenced your work and growth as a writer and how so? Are there any particular writers/artists, ideas, moments you consider to be major influences?
Honestly, I get a great spark out of seeing those, who I have been in close community with, meet joy at the point of accomplishment. Writers like Lauren Saxon, Bryan Byrdlong, Zach Williams, and others who I have seen build toward certain horizons and get reminded of the ways the world has charted their progress of late. It has been refreshing to witness how promise can be sentient even in windows of known anguish. The portal of discovery and witness allows me to return to the page as I have been doing when I can to move toward growth because I don't know if anyone is acquainted with growth in its time, if that makes sense. I'd also say that, every so often, I find a momentary muse despite the muck when I transported out of it via the minds and liberation of June Jordan, Wanda Coleman, Chester Himes, or James Baldwin, as of late and I'd be remiss to not mention contemporaries I find my work to be conversation with these days, especially when thinking about odes sudden in the search for your family or your heritage or yourself and that succession in social contexts or cultural excavation as a means for identity building and legacy-lineage hybrids: Shauna Barbosa, Kwame Opoku-Duku III, K Ming Chang, Taylor Byas, Karisma Price, Alan Chazaro, Bernard Ferguson, Malcolm Friend, and others.
What are you working on now?
Myself, in addition to a manuscript-in-progress living in the deconstruction of my own privileges within the arena of masculinity. It's been quite the challenge and I wouldn't want it any different.
If I could stay in line with the imagery from before. I mean the commerce is just as fragile, but largely now because of what I am choosing to deconstruct or grapple with about its value. At a lemonade stand, we revel in the exchange of satisfying the desire. That is what we are attuned to, what we are driving toward. I am more concerned now with what is done during the hibernation of those same desires. It is possible to make anything sweet when it is artificial and so I find myself thinking more about the essence of lemons and paying appropriate respect to the ingredients or the origins of what sustains me. When the lemonade stand is down indefinitely and our desire is outstanding, what is it our appetites turn to and how is that governed. In that same vein, I've been thinking often recently about what immediacy can and pushes us to discard and let go of. Obviously, we find ourselves now in a moment of great reclamation, revisiting reform as a means of social inception, so we challenge these larger structures and uplift and uproot traditions with radical love in mind. I want to equip myself with what is enough; it is okay to be without if that is excess.
That being said, I am in a period of pausing to unlearn. I am in the midst of inviting seasons that abolish what I planned for and feel my writing is taking on voice and urgency in a new light. I am writing most about my masculinity and the ways in which I have weaponized it previously while acknowledging how lineage can spill over from just the body to talk of the body. The endeavor of radicalizing community in enveloped happiness, where it brings me no joy to receive a return to sender. I can't settle for the joy of the exchange of language anymore because it is not joy without knowing if that language was received in the right manner, in a just way.
What has influenced your work and growth as a writer and how so? Are there any particular writers/artists, ideas, moments you consider to be major influences?
Honestly, I get a great spark out of seeing those, who I have been in close community with, meet joy at the point of accomplishment. Writers like Lauren Saxon, Bryan Byrdlong, Zach Williams, and others who I have seen build toward certain horizons and get reminded of the ways the world has charted their progress of late. It has been refreshing to witness how promise can be sentient even in windows of known anguish. The portal of discovery and witness allows me to return to the page as I have been doing when I can to move toward growth because I don't know if anyone is acquainted with growth in its time, if that makes sense. I'd also say that, every so often, I find a momentary muse despite the muck when I transported out of it via the minds and liberation of June Jordan, Wanda Coleman, Chester Himes, or James Baldwin, as of late and I'd be remiss to not mention contemporaries I find my work to be conversation with these days, especially when thinking about odes sudden in the search for your family or your heritage or yourself and that succession in social contexts or cultural excavation as a means for identity building and legacy-lineage hybrids: Shauna Barbosa, Kwame Opoku-Duku III, K Ming Chang, Taylor Byas, Karisma Price, Alan Chazaro, Bernard Ferguson, Malcolm Friend, and others.
What are you working on now?
Myself, in addition to a manuscript-in-progress living in the deconstruction of my own privileges within the arena of masculinity. It's been quite the challenge and I wouldn't want it any different.
Originally from the West Side of Chicago, Olatunde Osinaike is a Nigerian-American poet and software developer. He is the author of the chapbooks Speech Therapy, a winner in the Atlas Review’s 2019 Chapbook Series (forthcoming), and The New Knew (Thirty West). His work has been selected as winner of the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize, a winner of the Frontier Industry Prize, honorable mention for the Ploughshares Emerging Writer's Award in Poetry, and as a finalist for the Southeast Review Gearhart Poetry Prize and RHINO Poetry Editor's Prize. His most recent work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in publications such as Prelude, Puerto del Sol, Winter Tangerine, Cosmonauts Avenue, and the Columbia Poetry Review, as well as in the anthologies Best New Poets, 20.35 Africa, and New Poetry from the Midwest.