I am the word ramify, expansive with consequence.
Poetry | Tolu Oloruntoba | Issue 43
Indecision Tree
Some fishbone diagrams are planted head-down, their cause-and-effect skulls becoming roots in earths that like the whites inside of things. The reds, too. Red herring. Herringbone. Bone in throat. Throatbone. Some trees held the pulleys that crushed hyoid bones of my relatives. It is only fair that they eat what they killed. With their mouths slurping underground, I hope they choke on avenging bones. But I digress, as I do. I am not the word ramus. I am the word ramify, expansive with consequence. If there is no one root of the problem that I am, and my roots, call them predisposing factors, drape the shoreline in man-grove stilts holding each other; and if the stems that appear are conjoined at the waist, if the canopy is one indivisible leaf the afro comb cannot tear; and I find myself unsourced and non-destined, I can take, again, the moon's flensing crescent and flay a nest of cobras from myself. The snakes choose, chase, a water burial. My tree does not point a direction; its direction is the sky. I'm a quiver grown wide, undressed into the robe of sap flowing into the water. I cannot decide how to end this, but I
A fishbone diagram, also called an Ishikawa diagram, used to demonstrate the causes of an event. The structure of the mid-sentence ending was demonstrated in Sarah Vap's Winter: Effulgences, Devotions (Noemi Press, 2010).
Tolu Oloruntoba was born in Ibadan, Nigeria, where he studied and practiced medicine. He is the author of two collections of poetry, The Junta of Happenstance, winner of the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize and Governor General’s Literary Award and Each One a Furnace, a Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize finalist. He gave the 2022 League of Canadian Poets Anne Szumigalski Lecture, and is a Civitella Ranieri fellow.
Unravel by Tolu Oloruntoba. Copyright © 2025 Tolu Oloruntoba. Reproduced with permission from McClelland & Stewart, Penguin Random House Canada. All rights reserved.
Unravel by Tolu Oloruntoba Penguin Random House Canada
A poetic exploration of the cyclical philosophy of dismantling and remaking, Unravel is a moving and inventive rove through what could happen in the deconstructed aftermath of person and world.
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