By Nwodo Divine

The rasp of a moth wing, caught between windowpane
and the moon’s hard gaze.
A silent question mark
fluttering against the future,
the shadow stretched before our eyes,
but kept moving towards the bloom,
petals heavy with the scent
of honeyed bees.

Stars were bright pinpricks
against the velvet dark,
the storm a hum on the horizon.
And though it thundered,
It didn’t matter because of how still the air became
before the first crack. We kept
pressing through the reeds,
ignoring the rustling whispers
of unseen creatures.

Light can bend, fracture,
depending on the prism held.
In a spiderweb’s embrace,
a fly’s iridescence warps,
beauty turning predator.
This beauty, a constant tug,
yanked us closer to the edge,
just to reveal the dizzying view.
We nodded, again and again, to the hypnotic dance
of fireflies across the marsh.
Who can hear a plea
through the static of desire?
Naive to believe the web
was just silken embrace,
not a prison spun with patience.

But now, our hands shake like leaves
Caught in a sudden squall. Tangled and cold,
reaching for a form with wings lighter than dawn.
Hands that mistook the mirage for an oasis.
And on this cracked earth, we cry for that creature with wings,
which was always meant to fly.

BIO:

Nwodo Divine is a writer, researcher, and teacher. He posts on Twitter @chukwudivine_ and Instagram @nwododivine_

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.

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