Photo Credit: Flickr Rainy Ascension It begins like a grumble— a boy in the clouds learning to spit. The sky sprawls over the wheat fields, grey, & swollen, heavy as a belly in its ripe month. The goats, fat with waiting— stand knee-deep in the drowned soil, wool darkened, slick with birth water. A […]
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Photo Credit: Vecteezy.com Waiting for a Miracle Again, the worms in our empty stomachs rise before us. Their groans, louder than the cathedral bell. On days like this, the tradition, as it should be, is to savor the aroma of chickens obeying the spatula in boiling oil. but in my home, chickens are on
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Photo Credit: Envato Elements The Sin on your Chest I see God hawking attraction in your body, a barricade of beauty promenading through berry-hedge paths of your temple. & I sulk at male determinant: singular baby-chaser messing the brotherhood. there are things that are too toxic about your body— one is your front, a canvas of persecution. i have consumed more abuse & bewitchment than what my stomach can bear. What do I profit, tell me? am I not a lecher, enmeshed in mud pie π? I am short of appetite; I am nauseating. isn’t it strange how you own this much sin trickling on your chest, & yet not professing a word to your smasher? I’ve implemented distancing, rehearsed a breakup to console my heart once. my father knows these folktales— it kills heart-to-heart conversation. sometimes, I blame God for testing His hypothesis on your body. in my algebraic thoughts, you conceal numbers in a home of small latitude, astonishing us with many routes of waitresses.
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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
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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
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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
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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,
Shapes of no more Victor Uwaifo said: you buy shirt shirt tears if God creates soul soul will go back to its owner the body that we use minimally would turn sands so i could not tell you to stay & if i break cascades down goodbye, goodbye handful of body-sands thrown to the teeth
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Anxiety is a way of life Filter Like a sieve, I am drained Of every dewdrop of happiness Through the mesh of my hollow body. And I– dust in the fireworks of light Escape the drizzling storms of darkness. I– billowed tusk of winterbourne Streaming down into a gorge Of landscaped realities Acculturate the mimesis
Anxiety is a way of life – Adesiyan Oluwapelumi. Read More »
