poetry column

Invisibility

Published

1 year ago

January 6, 2023

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 day scattered all over the bodies we will later come to lose,
I filtered the sun and sang the moon into the ears of the night.
Is this not what the body does, holding what does not belong to it?
I fought for my breath to remain in my lungs like bees in their hives,
But I lost it when I chanted a bamu tsaro, give us security.
As if to say, my mouth whiffed out a bamu tsoro, give us fear.
I hoisted a white flag on the street and my mother buried another child.
I have seen home scraped out of the anatomy of its name,
Children blown until they are as weightless as their dreams
And their mothers’ bodies evolved into a garden of chrysanthemums.
I wonder if this country is another form of exile.
If you must know, this is how my country made us invisible:

Chased from home,
Heated under the sun’s gathering skirt
And drown in other names of water—
Tears.

BIO:
Zaynab Bobi, Frontier I, is a Nigerian-Hausa poet, digital artist, and photographer from Bobi. She is a member of HCAF, and a Medical student at Usmanu Danfodiyo University Sokoto. Her works have appeared in Strange Horizons, FIYAH Magazine, Native Skin, Lucent Dreaming, Agbowo, MaskLit, Anomaly, Night Coffee Lit, and elsewhere. She recently joined Visual Verse as an intern assistant editor and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Strange Horizons, and a Best of The Net Award. She tweets @ZainabBobi.

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poetry column

Lances at the hedges of light

Published

5 days ago

April 18, 2024

NewsDirect

By Samuel A. Betiku

With Nigeria’s economy and poverty levels worsening, abductions have become an almost daily occurrence in recent years — Reuters

Until now, you savoured the world in packets of myth, moon-
lit frolic and a cot where the soft ripple of praise succeeds the rooster’s
call and the amber flush of afterglow. What did you know of a country
flailing outside the stained glasses of your eyes, eyes your mother looked into
to relearn the curves of a hymn: what did you know of being a prey
or of a complicit knot of trees and underbrush lining a dire trail,
blanketing the gleam of tomorrow. You watch your friends trudge on,
each laboured step a prayer no one dares to say out loud. When you open
your mouths, it is to let out a wisp of stifled cry, to risk the gruff nudge
of a gun. At the end of the road, your plundered selves waiting, inescapable.
What can you give to stay a haloed house? You look down at your feet
crusted with crimson and grit and imagine your mother sitting outside
the shed, the quiet sob of petition, the drooped heft of her brow, barely able
to stare at a sky spangled with lights closer to home than her daughter.

BIO:
Samuel A. Betiku is a Nigerian writer from the city of Ondo, South West Nigeria. His works have appeared in journals and anthologies, including Rattle, The Offing, Frontier poetry, The Temz Review, Trampset, The Christian Century, Strange Horizons, Agbowó, The Deadlands, and elsewhere.

poetry column

The Knowledge

Published

2 weeks ago

April 5, 2024

NewsDirect

By Kei Vough Korede

In a dream, two bars of soap
Were handed to me—
One containing melancholy.
The other, mirth.
A voice instructed me to give
The former to my father and keep
The latter for myself.
I broke each bar into half
And handed a half of each soap to my father:
His pain is my pain. My joy is his joy.

BIO:
Kei Vough Korede, he/they, poet, fashion and mustache enthusiast. He works on his manuscript Oral History. Flirt with him on Twitter @theDilatedSoul

poetry column

I die like waves

Published

3 weeks ago

April 1, 2024

NewsDirect

By Daniel Orisaeke

On the shoreline, I watch
the sun—a halved-cut lemon
dip into the sea,
language written
in the dance of waves
there is a pull and I succumb.
The man beside me murmurs a few words
about dying.
Iniquities,
like beads, jut out from my pores
before hands
drown me into a sea of lemonade.
I die like the waves.
A bitter-sweet enveloping—opaque & quiet
there is a pain before I see black.
I wonder if my tears segregate,
seeking absolution.
I resurrect a new creature—made whole
but the sourness lingers.