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By Muhammed Olowonjoyin in the end, we’re all constructs of things that couldn’t kill us. and what we are left with when their knives fail are fears to pillage our chests on days when we watch the disasters our dreams and longings are tiptoeing into. everything a man tries to save cannot be saved for ...
By Abdulmueed Balogun Adewale (For Shabina Feisal) Take this tawdry dunya by the edge, like the frail wings of a moth, with the tips of your fingers. Take life as a staged melodrama full of cameos, seasons of plots and tons of twists. Take every step as if pacing the palms of a slippery road ...
By Okoronkwo Chisom My grandfather told my father that he could be anything he wanted, so he chiseled his body to look like rain. He fell in droplets into a tank of an abstract noun — a name that lacks ownership. In a dream I learned the chemistry of forgetting, I tried to hold the ...
By Saheed Sunday there are different voices at the centre of what holds láfeńwá up. the first time we held our heads over the demarcation between this home and the rest of the city, we witnessed faith crawling into versions god might have skipped their details: cracks in the voice of the boy who covers ...
By Bayo Aderoju Something about wanting to be the head of a headless mob like the young activist who has never read Jeyifo, who said: Frantz Fanon is a wretched name. Some are preaching positive asphyxiation of some of the times that crooked this time, but dead will still mean dead when my father’s name ...
By Prosper C. Ìféányí Listen. The flowers weren't once devastating in their beauty. No logic came from burning rosebushes; & somewhere, in the field, the birds are eating a man's shame. I am drinking black coffee & walking barefooted in winter; I am a pane of glass shattered like china in the sun, & the ...
By Zaynab Bobi Law of invisibility: arrange the atoms in a solid object randomly. Heat at high temperature and cool down immediately. There is a realm in my mouth In my mouth, there is a dream In the dream, men are wingless canaries And water is extinct from the breast of the sea. With the ...
after Samuel Adeyemi's Desist Hymn By David Solomon Mouthless god or godless mouth? my mouth opens in search of what has not deserted me: soft dust curls out like hang ropes. when i was a child, mother lapped an old bible over the white sheets that covered her cancer. she spread it so gently, as ...
By Alaro Basit & yet again, like a seamster, I want to weave my past into my present. O Lord, help release a butterfly from this network of webs; I want to savor every blossoming petal in this garden & not feel a thorn in my wings. I want to lie at the precipice of ...
By Onyekachi Iloh Sorry, I was in the shower. Sorry, my phone died. Sorry, I was doing the laundry. Sorry, I was at the North Pole. Penguins were sliding on the ice all around us. Sorry, old grief was at my door again, rapping at it with the urgency of someone who needs bathroom. Sorry, ...
By Wendy Okekethe new year begins in the Septembers we flee again. Fireworks bleed into the sky, a nuanced rainbow.Night traffic glaze windows beyond a bridge of cars.On a purple couch, Sunday rests. A blunt. A sweet love. & ...
By Hassan A. Usman There's no figurative way to say this: I'm heartbroken. It's sunset again— I arrange my body where there's a flicker, learning new ways to excite my grief. Light, even light, is damned to darkness. A bird flutters in the sky, asks why my kind of ruin is so exceptional. Say, the ...
By Ayoade Olamide Joy, they say, approaches in the morning, but this one breaking from my skin holds the semblance of a comet & I don't know when it would hit. This art of liberty forms a laceration on my chest, & all I can see is a honeycomb of starlight filling the crevice with ...
By Dami Ajayi (for Chebet) We let the logistics of saying goodbye overwhelm us, like young lovers. We remain tentative although we meant to be spontaneous. With ethanol & laughter & the canopy of night we feasted on music & our bodies, whispers into ossicles tickle when you contend with blooming Hi-Fis when you have ...
By Joy Mamudu The first time I saw a rake, I was a child lost in the wonder of the metal fingers that gathered leaves into heaps I could roll in later, my laughter burning like incense to the gods in the heavens above. The first time I fell into your smile was the first ...
By Odukoya Adeniyi By laying on my father’s bed, I have come to memorise the triggers of art. The body so frail, ashes chorus the last laugh. Dreams begin like a painting. In water, they form quakes, captives, canisters and other unsightly instances. Through an atlas, I touch the integration of surrender— how God kept ...
By Olumide Manuel boy in a tarmac of bruises, rigid winds with sharp tips washing off his scalp like a cinnabar of fresh amnesia. raids of fright reminiscent of the grime of the bloodflood; the residual of soiled platelets; banks of memory clot, as well as the coordinates through it? boy, you survived. remember? your ...
…Says grief is a living force making the familiar foreign By Flourish Joshua Two weeks ago, Flourish Joshua sat with Wendy Okeke, a poet and convener of Convener of Purge and Penance, a captivating poetry event that examines the duality of release and reckoning. In this interview, she touches on grief and how to communicate ...
By Olowo Qudus Opeyemi where i came from/ still smells of wet hyacinths & rotten mangoes/ that is what—the rain brings out of that place/ & i’m beginning to travel back to memories/ where grief was a mirage/ & grandma’s beige portrait was still clearer/ than the rainbows. i remember years i drooled/ on mother’s ...
By Amina Akinola i've watched leaves change colour / seasons / fading into oblivion / life wander across my eyes / like smoke / into unknown destinations initially / every part of myself had a lingering of yesterday / gushing / into streams of grief and let me tell you this: death is not the ...
By Sodïq Oyèkànmí —after reading Adedayo Agarau tonight i take a piece of paper & fill it with the names of everything lost to the rumbling river to the earth to the hands that plucked & plucked until what’s left are the crumbs ...
By Samuel A. Adeyemi Still skinny as ever. My hair, shorter, receding more. What I've learnt, though— to love myself even in my solitude, to treat the body not as a temple, but as a wound; cleansed, purified. Only a fixed body will be worshiped in, adored like Protestants before stained glass. Indeed I've learnt ...
By Shedrack Opeyemi Akanbi —for the sibling I should have carried around the neighborhood on my shoulders. You stay at the gate of this poem as chrysanthemums lining the entrance of a home. I mean you can't sit at dinner tonight, like always. I am spluttering the thick pus of bruised hope that fills my ...
By Haruna Abdulmajid there is a boy drowning next door. he has a perforated intestine & his feces, slowly leaking into his abdominal cavity. there is a boy and there are a lot of them trying to stay afloat in the water but everything is going against them including the current. imagine starting your day ...
by Mgbabor Emmanuel Chukwudalu because bathing in the moon's fluorescence is a kind of ritual — saltwater cascading my torso. forgive me, baptism is the washing away of old shadows: a cleansing of the body into a holy sacrament— a new paradox. this is how i build language on my brittle tongue like sandcastles. i ...
