Margins by Damilola Oyedeji

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i.    outside the main body

ii.   outside the limit

iii. a measure or degree of difference

    ~ Meriam Webster Dictionary

***

Everything outside my body is excessive.

Everything on and inside it, too. The multiplex

of my eyebrows. The timbre of my voice

​

escaping their lispy lip doors. The tilt

of my belly is more than a tilt. It’s the moon,

round, but it weighs more than a circle. I’m a circle

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of desires my body will not permit. The first doctor

I see tells me, you will be fine if you do not grow

fat. Shamefaced before a mirror, I pinch the skin

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of my belly to let out the air. Hissing back

at me are strings of cysts, not air. Hissing back

is my sister’s voice note, you need to lose weight.

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Hissing back are the blue stories of uterine bodies

in my lineage. Pink fibroids linger in my aunt’s grave.

​One lonely breast in my step-grandmother’s.

​

Everything inside me is blue, is excessive,

is blue, for what is the naming of a body

set outside the margin?

​

When the radiologist slips an IV into my left

cubital vein, he thrusts a ball into my right palm

and says, squeeze this if it starts to hurt.

​

I play guess-what with the MRI machine

as it tries to uncover what is excessive inside me:

a triple beep for a warning, an unending screech

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means terror, the soft breathe in-hold your breath-

breathe out command is a lullabic dirge. I sway

into a small dream in which I’m standing outside

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a threshold. It’s empty inside because no one

is normal. Everyone is only acting. Every voice

I hear is blue and outside the margin. Every body,

​

blue and outside, too. Hands, blue from hiding

their blue bodies. Mouths, blue from biting

others blue. I dig my right fingers

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into the squeeze ball. It hurts.

It blues. Every body hurts.

Every body is blue.

​

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Bio

Runner-up Damilola Oyedeji is a Nigerian poet, essayist, and literary critic. Her work explores intersectional discourses of Black bodies experiences. Damilola is the author of the forthcoming chapbook Blue Scapes, with Thirty West Publishing House, PA. 

 

A Best of the Net nominee, as well as recipient of the 2026 William Walker Excellence in Critical Writing Award, the 2025 Robert Henigan Critical Essay Award, and the C.H. Gelin Graduate Fellowship Award, her works have appeared in LLIDS Journal, Lolwe, Orange Blossom Review, The Shallow Tales Review, Brittle Paper, The Nigeria Review, Talon Review, Belfast Review, Poetry Journal, the Sprinng Writing Fellowship 2023 Anthology, and elsewhere.

 

A past fellow of the Sprinng Writing Fellowship herself, Damilola mentors emerging writers in creative nonfiction through the Sprinng Writing Fellowship. She is a PhD student in Creative Writing at Texas Tech University and holds a master’s degree in English from Missouri State University.