Cyborg of Seasons A personal essay culled from my novel – ECLIPTIC If I truly mentioned rough plays then, I should tell of the drum survival that almost claimed my life. Until I entered the average, rusted, steel drum and they covered it, I never knew what hell looked like. As if it wasn’t enough. […]
Cyborg of Seasons – Psalmuel Benjamin. Read More »
The Noise of Silence Papa used to yell moderation at the patters of my otiose footfalls, but now, he remains indifferent even when I consciously stamp my feet on the hard floor. The sun recesses at the appearance of a nimbus cloud, but these days, it does not blink even at the presence of a downpour until it is time for it to set. Everything has become stubborn; my room which used to echo when I yell in it, our family car which used to start once you insert its key into the ignition and turn it. The gas cylinder which used to last for a month once we fill it, even the foliage outside which used to bounce back when I try to sweep it off were not left out. Then the stench of my farts, which used to linger like a visitor who has refused to grace home, has become faint and ephemeral. Papa, Mama and I used to have our separate rooms at the different corners of our flat, although their rooms were much closer unlike mine which was separated by the narrow sitting room in between. All the rooms are actually alike except for the nuances. Mine had a puerile pink outlook, Mama’s had a peony outlook, bold like a gory sight, while Papa’s was just plain. After my parents moved their luggage into my room to share it with me, it became our room and therefore lost its resonance. Our new tenants, whom Papa had rented out their rooms to, moved in not quite long, after they must’ve washed their new residence. Questions hung in my eyes while these happened, but I chose not to mouth them since I can pluck my answers from my parents’ ripe sighs. I often wonder whether my parents were comfortable in a puerile pinkish room, but their plain miens submitted only vacant answer sheets. Each day I amble back home from lectures and my ears weren’t waxed by the usual cracks of laughter in their throats, fear weaves cobwebs, and leaves it hanging in my chest. Mama would open the door for me, espy my mien, part and shut her lips without words, and give me a side hug. I always watch her lips each time it parts, hoping it will curve into an arc or even an arch and emit some sounds, but I never received more than a smirk. What happened? Why is everyone and everything noiselessly taking a different, weird shape? I felt restless, like a series obsessive who had missed plenty of story arcs in a series. Mama would serve dinner and instruct everyone to close their eyes for a brief prayer. Then my ears would scratch the atmosphere for whispers of prayers to no avail until after a few minutes when Mama and Papa would chorus amen, and begin to eat. Our next door neighbour’s infant son let out shrill cries now and then, but Papa, who used to be an aficionado of tranquility would tilt his head to the rhythm of the cries whilst eating, leaving my anxious eyes stranded, and I end up gaping. Other things changed, too. The quantity and frequency of our meals, the rate of laughter and music plays, too. Papa, whose presence was like the ungraspable air, had become handier than a handbag. He would sit and gape vacantly in the vestibule after breakfast until dusk. He would hum to passersby who cared to greet him and remain still. One-day, I had tickled this silence when I sat beside him and asked whether he doesn’t work anymore. He stole a gaze at me and averted his gaze quick enough to avoid my stare. “Yes. Didn’t your mother tell you that I lost my job?” he asked. I stood up outright and staggered. “You say?” I asked. Dad squinted before his gaze rested on me as he simpered. He said nothing else. Some teenagers were shambling back from school with their heavy bags. They stole glances at us as they shambled away. Papa readjusted his feet, and returned his averted gaze to its anterior position. There, he stared vacantly at the school tots through the security bar door. I tried taking another step and limped. “Nwayokwa… take it easy.” He reached out to me. After that day, I started cutting down my expenses and making savings, too. In my head, I had caught the invisible fingers typing gibberish on the sedate keyboard of our
The Noise of Silence – Sandra Uche Delumozie Read More »
Dear Hafizah: A Letter To My Threshold of Glee Dear Hafizah, I am sorry that you haven’t heard from me lately. I have developed a habit of trying to ignore your existence, not because I don’t want to share in your smiles or because I despise the way you own my threshold of glee, but because the way you pretend your love to me is too much of a deception to bear and because, maybe, it is time that I could no longer retain a room for you in my heart, and I have had enough tears from you that drown me away from your life. Yesterday, exactly the time I used to overcome my ego to call you—that time when the sun receded and the moon sparkled its glow, nearly adoring all the sky with its luminescence that resembled your glimmering smile—I was so engrossed in thought of what was actually the problem that my light didn’t send in a call to hear about the ache my body developed in her absence. I tried calling all the lines you once called me with, but getting you through was nothing I was close to. My heart grew a sudden consciousness, meditating on what was happening, and my star’s light was dimmed with the rays of silence. I tried consoling my heart to let go of the thought, but each effort I made drew me more and more closer to the memories we had during our stay in secondary school. That time when you would, during physics classes, turn around with, to me, the purest cosmetics on earth—your smile—just to see if I was also stealing a glance at the angelic beauty shrouded in your never-grow-old face. At biology classes, when the subject master arrived, you would always find a way to tease me, a way to let me remember that I didn’t love biology at all, yet it’s your favorite. You would spring up to your feet in merriment just to greet the biology master. Still, the memories of the day you were made the head girl of our school and I, the head boy, pierced my mind—that moment when I was smiling not because of the position but because of the way I got myself cuddled to you in the students’ leadership. I thought that would catalyse the rate at which the exothermic reaction between us occurred. Yet, all these memories are things of the past, and because I couldn’t get you through that night, I walked out of my father’s house and proceeded to your area, praying that God would help me have a clash with you. I was moving with a mind that deserted my body when I got into an encounter with our classmates; among them was a friend of mine whom you hold as your boyfriend. The first time I learned that the love I wanted to get from you was already offered to someone voluntarily, and he didn’t care about you the way you do, I became bereft of the words my tongue would nurture for speaking out to you. Here I was—a student who demoted himself back to your class, causing him an additional year in school—searching for your love only to find it already placed in someone’s heart—a wretched blow that I couldn’t let pass just like that without further trying to secure your love back in my heart, a place where only your thoughts dwell. The very moment I met them, I felt happiness surging in me and grief mushrooming in my heart—a happiness that I saw someone close to your heart and a grief that my eyes caught a glimpse of who took me away from owning your love. I was disturbed to meet him conversing with you on a call that you insisted on initiating. To my surprise, you even moved to ask him to come over to your house, but he refused. Out of the love I had to see you then, I coerced him to go for you, promising to be in his company. I did that just to see you. Believe me, that’s just it. And when I saw you, even though jealousy couldn’t let us speak to each other, I got comforted that my eyes were fed with what they longed for, and my heart was reminded that, however much effort was pulled together towards reaching your heart, there
Dear Hafizah: A Letter To My Threshold Of Glee – Yahuza Usman. Read More »
A Cyborg God, My Country and Her People: A Holocaust, An Iconography of War and Grief God, a cyborg, holds the earth with his metal hands, redeeming the sun to Himself. Is He not wonderful, filching pearls from us? An aristocratic behaviour. A sword with two eyes: happiness and its sibling. God’s acre, a cathedral for the dead. He furloughs personage to sleep, plunging his iron hands into homes first, then bodies until they are breathless. A crimson rose with the chirping of birds. Do the lenses in his binocular not magnify beyond the sky? Or how come he fails to see, in the threater section, red and black maquillage on the breast of the roads; She, a country—Nigeria, and our hands? In today’s newspaper, bodies laid there, speechless. Terrorists, blood coursing through their veins, swore to experiment on more specimens—our bodies—with bullets and grenades. Sterile patients with a Colloq broke ransom. Not even God is safe in this place, because anyone who carries him on their tongue dies, and my grandfather too. What loss has inflected in me through this incision is grievance, and I have not found a cure. Every midnight I book for cure: before I enter into God’s alcove, I sanitize my body with sterilized water; immerse my Qalb in faith.. I know, one day, I, not only me, will survive. I whistle the language He understands into the zephyr: وارحمنى اغفرلى ياربى. That is, God, before you touch me with a scalpel, disinfects me from my sins; then, rehab me with blessing. Nirvana. In Maiduguri, I asked what it costs to get home and they answered, “your life with a touch of a ransom to settle life-threatened nurses that help patients in captivity. ” As if I will go extinct. A stereotypical behaviour. I think of my country, and the arithmetic says dead | blood | no future. Here, everyone who dials for cure from illness, dies unhealing in this hill road. God, my country and her people: a holocaust, an iconography of war and grief. Contributor’s Bio Ismail Yusuf Olumoh is a Nigerian creative writer, teacher, a poet, a spoken word artiste,
Blemishes How do you spell grief when you are rammed in the neck by the butt of a shotgun loaded with betrayals as bullets? All I could do was scrawl pain into empty air and watch them splatter like sheep blood, with each drop jetting out to unknown distance. That was how I came to realise that you can never see it all until pain befriends you. I now know all it takes to walk round a garden of thistles and shake off; unbruised. My father once pinned my pet cock to the ground with a knife to its neck for Easter. Now my body has morphed into feathers, beak and claws — weakened and threatened. The pain that accompanies betrayal stuck to my skin like a blemish, ignoring every plea to wash away. Contributor’s Bio Igbokwe Roseline is a Nigerian medical student in her penultimate year and a creativewriter who has works published in Kalahari Review, Brittle Paper, Eboquills, World Voices Magazine, Writers Space Africa, Arkore Arts, the Moveee, Icreative Review, The Moveee, Ta Adesa, Shuzia Anthology, SAP Anthology, Poetik City Africa, Stripes Lit, Arts Lounge, etc. She was shortlisted for the Labari Prize For Poetry, BKPW prize, Shuzia prize; longlisted for the Wakaso Poetry Prize For Female, DKA Annual Poetry Prize; winner of the Poetree IWD Spoken Word Contest; winner of Hera Marketing, Gemspread, New Cheese Academy and Challenging The Writers writing contests. She’s on Instagram @igbokweroses and X @IgbokweEzinne
Blemishes – Igbokwe Roseline. Read More »
Empty Page “The Shattering Of A Heart When It’s Broken Is The Loudest Quiet Ever”—Carroll Bryant I think Adele lied when she sang “never mind I’ll find someone like you.” Do you think she ever did? Do you think there are really people like other people? Like the way the person smiled, laughed, talked, walked,
Empty Page – Joemario Umana. Read More »
Looking through the Lens of Words into an Empty Morning Cloud: A Review of Tolu’ A. Akinyemi’s The Morning Cloud is Empty Tolu’ A. Akinyemi, who has published one poetry chapbook and fifteen collections of poems, among which are Dead Lions Don’t Roar, Dead Dogs Don’t Bark, Dead Cats Don’t Meow, A Booktiful Love, City of Lost Memories, Born in Lockdown, etc., has been consistent not only in his thematic leaning on
We Only Care About The Beautiful Things the clock is moving backward, & the sun is stealing the traces of our smiles. everything bears the negative meaning of its name—the smiles we pretend to be missing, the embrace of the light, and the dryness of the sky. we only care about the things with flashy skins. the wind kept swinging between two end-points: water & hell. water is blind, the hell has flares. father said, the thing next to water is flame. the flame is blind too. yet, we only care about the beautiful things. there is a garden on our palms. water is red, roses are red. everything looks strange from within. roses are beautiful, and red water is horrible. & we only care about the beautiful things. we are servants of what refused to be ours. we are boys, we are men, & sometimes we identified as commodities on a market stalls. the market, a dark room. the stalls, a thorn bed, massaging the curtain between our skins and bones. it is all monstrous. but still, we only care about the beautiful things. Contributor’s Bio Mubarak Said, TPC XII, SprinNG & SAF Alumni, is the winner of the 2023 Bill Ward Prize For Emerging Writers (Prose) and
We Only Care About The Beautiful Things – Mubarak Said Read More »
Weals from the Rain “What ear to our sobbing hearts?” -Birago Diop. We lost them– our brothers that darted outside to set the drums to the catchment & never returned. Yesterday night, we longed for rain on our roofs. & it rained–it rained cats and dogs. This morning, Our verandah was lost in the flood of
Weals from the Rain – Arikewusola Abdul Awal. Read More »
IF ALL THE SCARS IN MY HEART WERE LADIES, THEY WOULD HAVE BEEN GROWN ENOUGH TO BE WEARING BRAS After Zainab Kuyizhi The walls of my heart has grown into a bonfire I wear these scars like old habits. once, a girl searched through my heart & ended up not finding flowery sinews or veins,
