Tempest in Bódìjà, Ìbàdàn
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.…
poetry column
Four Haikus
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 .…
August: Ecopoetry/Nature Poetry Month
Throughout the month of August, the column will be open to pieces that explore the poetics of the natural world, not distinct from civilization, but deeply impacted or quickened by it. The poems need not strictly be about climate change…
Adam
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…
The allophone of my heart’s phoneme
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…
i’m here, mother i’m here
By Taiwo Hassan in this poem, fire wears the essence of its irony and i’m drowning. touch this skin, there’s a home burning in each of its pores. make no mistake, these ashes are not meant to be unburnt, so…
refrain:
By Ruona to be at the pinnacle’s peak –no more bars to cross not one prayer to say even here is the world swirling chaotic around me and i am breathing the confusion settled around my neck to…
And in all these ways a woman is God
By Roseline Mgbodichinma I. In the chapel, the bell rings & the pendulum swings all into solemnity – the same way a mother’s breast becomes hose and stills the clamour of a child, The only salvation I know is an…
Dilution is the cure for pain, so I paint a landscape of tears
By Anointing Obuh This is how I remember my home downtown: Flowers fisting together like a child[‘s] hand, sprayed along the meagre journey From the patio to my room. The rain outside similar, to my mother’s tired eyes in this…
Sprout
By Ejiro Elizabeth Edward I am earning loss as an inheritance Despair is a betrothal of life & death & my best friend is growing towards her extinction The doctor announces a new cell sprouting, coiling itself into her bone…