to cleave a cicada
By Emmanuel Mgbabor you pull each nylon wing as you would unhinge a star from the sky’s dress. & for the first time, you watch a thing discolour in your palm. & i love you for this bravery, for the…
poetry column
The Dead Way of Seeing Things
By Chinecherem Enujioke On this beach, there is no one. The footprints say too much. About the past. Things that remain unsaid but heard. Voices reaching to join the hallelujah from the church atop the hill. I raise the sand…
Cenotaph
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…
A Compendium of Excuses To Not Call In The Aftermath of Falling Out of Love
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…
An Extra Note On Brokenness
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…
Portrait of Childhood
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…
Self-Portrait At Twenty
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…
A boy considering the antonyms of a miracle
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…
Drowning
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…
Lunar Bath
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…