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Poetry Column
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 ...
Poetry Column
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 ...
Poetry Column
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 ...
Poetry Column
…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 ...
Poetry Column
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 ...
Poetry Column
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 ...
Poetry Column
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 ...
Poetry Column
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 ...
Poetry Column
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 ...
Poetry Column
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 ...
Poetry Column
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 ...
Poetry Column
By Ajani Samuel Victor Everything is music. The saunter of dried leaves in a bereaved city. The crackle of creaks in a deserted home. The prana of my mother on the physician's mat. I wish to psalm my life into a vintage of amen and hosannas, to twirl my tongue and fashion a nectar of ...
Poetry Column
By Njikonye Charles N. somewhere in the west of Africa, the sky is plummeting its blue is smeared by terror, & every evening star, running we swerve our tongues into cathedrals of prayers, for violence gushes into each second like mercury, as if to imply that what has come to be, has come to be. ...
Poetry Column
By Damilola Omotoyinbo here, a man sail storms with a paddle carved out of his fear. a heart mourns the loss of bliss. a mind empties itself of its memories. a woman traces the map. to a home that won't spit her into a volcano. in this poem, wails only tumble back as echoes. shattered ...
Poetry Column
By Joshua Effiong I learned the best way to live is die / with your heart kicking, like what a fetus does to its fragile home / your eyelids flickering like lightning // I have learned to fetch the stars / have them liquefied and offered to a Bartimaeus// Consider this poem a pool of ...
Poetry Column
By Gideon Emmanuel Whatever it is you are struggling to remember, it is not poised on the tip of your tongue, not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen. - Billy Collins childhood memories are like lanterns with a false burning The walls in my room are growing old & cold ...
Poetry Column
By Olalekan Daniel Kehinde on the head of green hopes nested whits of weeds towering into empires; small colonies carving circumferences of warmth, bordered landmarks. son, brave beaks formed these homes with veiny bones from skeletal trees. the birds, they sheathe themselves with branched greens like an ambushed army, they circumcise the fruiting apples and ...
Poetry Column
After Anthony Okpunor's "Confession" By Charles Nnanna there's a hole in this poem. a buried hole. each line is a seed in the quiet; cracking, desperate for daybreak: see a soul longing for a body, see a tongue toiling to find its dialect. yesterday I told some strangers to quit visiting the mirror anytime I ...
Poetry Column
By Ehiorobo Derek My body is a wild flower that only blooms at night. When the day comes, I rise with the sun, you see, I consider myself its student. I have always been given to combustion. Once, when I was 13, I threw a fistful of termites into a flame & watched it dance ...
Poetry Column
Michael Chiedoziem Chukwudera The spoken word poetry album, “Music has Failed Us” is the debut album by the poet Abu Ibrahim who goes by the stage name, “IB.” Along with other poets from around the world, they are currently advocating that the Recording Academy create a distinct category for poetry at the Grammys. In this ...
Poetry Column
By Abdulkareem Abdulkareem My bliss is a gun empty of bullets, teach me how to mould a body that won’t know the way to the middle of a river, how to sing a song that won’t pull my throat towards an ache, a ballad that strides towards a hiatus. My body, a choir echoing itself ...
Poetry Column
By Eniola Abdulroqeeb Arówólò these syllables foaming in my mouth like bubbles resurrecting on the face of a lagoon are tasteless & ominous when requiems keep bursting out of me like unstoppable deluge. i filch a song from the mouth of a derelict thrush and tuck it neatly inside my larynx; doing this, maybe my ...
Poetry Column
By Muiz Opeyemi Ajayi In this poem I crack open a Quran for the first time in a long while. & in my stuttering recitation I envied God for his biting eloquence. The musicality of verses. Refrains of Duha. Shamsu. Ar-rahman resounding its anaphora into Fabi ayi Allahi rabbikumo tukazziban. At the moderasat, we perfect ...
Poetry Column
By Nwuguru Chidiebere Sullivan Once again, May ends with my bare hands forgetting the gracious works they owe me; I who was forsaken to the mercy of April - a sinner who speaks nothing but apology, slivering the woodland in guilt- to be lost in a forest is to be so close to evergreen; a ...
Poetry Column
By Flourish Joshua we woo the winds bullying brown roofs & hang them on baobabs to make gentle evenings for fables that tickle our buttocks to a dance. no one jumps into the river except the land is a knife. no one looks the sun in the face except it rains misery. home holds the ...
Poetry Column
By Ogedengbe Tolulope Impact Agodi garden sipping clouds from my coffee By the creeks of the Niger father's gravestone . . . just before the sea Oduduwa's land . . . the footprint of Oranmiyan stands high Osun river . . . the goddess's teeth on white bricks BIO: Ogedengbe Tolulope Impact is a multiple ...
Poetry Column
By Offor Emmanuel The silvery flow From atop the rocky sands Streaming, shining, like mermaid's strands Isimmiri – harbinger of life Dwelling place for shrimps, crabs, toads, turtles, fishes Feeding the thirsty ferns and mosses The dark green trees and shrubs, waving in admiration The passageway to Isimmiri – like the mouth of the cave ...
Poetry Column
By Ayokunle Samuel Betiku Dulcet wind, sing of heights. We climb the long-drawn steps into rewards beyond the screaming feet, lift hands in rapture as if to pull gravity into surrender. It is the blue teeming with avian grandeur that calls before the resplendent interspersions of rusty roofs down below. The surrounding wood land, verdant ...
Poetry Column
By Blessing Omeiza Ojo I found myself in the garden behind our family house and began falling in love with the god in fruits. I would have fallen for the pretty girls on the street of a city in Nigeria or Singapore. Thinking of my loss, I had burnt a pot of stew and my ...
Poetry Column
By Michael Imossan —after Nome Emeka Patrick My heart gravitates towards silence like a vowel moving towards destruction. Forgive me, assimilation is the process where life assumes the features of its antonym. At the expanse of the moon, I see a child's face, a calabash, a vulture, the breath of a roving tiger — but ...