The Wolf Howls for Her Death Mission -Enit’ayanfe Ayosojumi Akinsanya.
The Wolf Howls for Her Death Mission hearth i’m stuck where indigo shadows play & the light is terse & half glimpses dance like prints of a dark blue moon or like leaves leaving a lonely sky when branches are too weak to carry the stories of night sway, sway i don’t know when i will become it, but i feel it earth i listen to the doors closing o p e n i n g speaking the rain is sand on my soul bury, bury if these bones & stones do not smother me, then i can catch you in her bed, in her deep i can clutch winds of new watch altered longings leap to flame in me—feral i am the wolf that will howl her death mission that will hear the gong of wisdom somewhere in the thick of these moon-deadened leaves that will say: don’t. quiet!…
I Now Bleach – Adedokun Ibrahim Anwar.
I Now Bleach It is in your loss I mastered the alphabets of silence, & this one here bleaches me into memories and memories and, memories, pardon, I lose count every time I get emotional. This memory is almost silent, but, I hear it, sometimes ago I learned photos to be the fastest way to run backwards into time, I learned them/ to be louder than voices in fact/silence. There are moments I turn to God without mentioning your name, forgive me – I do not mean to do this. It’s silent here, my heartbeat matches the defibrillator in your ward last week. Here you are the memory every instant summons, and I the body that bleaches into you. The silence here transforms me into everything. I keep your photos for days like today, this time I will not forget to say your name before God. This time, I get…
Portrait of a Bleak Future – Okoronkwo Chisom.
Portrait of a Bleak Future Today, I held a clandestine meeting with the voices in my head & they went berserk. The disarray disrobed me of light. Say, my heart assumed the silhouette of a woman nurturing her aches like a tender tulip in the dead of night. I’m docile to nothing but growth. Once, I was faced with a conundrum that has the shape of my father’s demon. To escape, I mounted the back of a wind ferrying away my fears. There’s no safety here. Every danger that confronts me comes with a dagger. There’s a sun scorching the leaves of my hopes to make them wither. Don’t blame this heart when it rejects a hope capsule. There’s not enough water to irrigate the florescent petals of my dreams that fight for survival in this land. Yesterday, I broke through the barricade of my future & lost gusto. To bask in…
Exit – Emmanuel Yamba.
Exit for Uncle Lawrence because you have investedall of your time searching for anaccent to call on God with, that only himunderstands – you empty yourself of words.for there is no taste of prayer on your tonguebut you managed to unravel it like a gift somethingthat resembles the silence bury within your heart,at night – when the moon sends the sun to bed.every part of you keeps calling God with differentnames like marketers begging a buyer.in this poem, there is a black boy who wantsto survive this dew of pain falling& wants for God to do with grief what ease does to pain,what light does to darkness – to plant lifein a body that knows not how to live.he moves beyond doubt & waits on God for an answer; faith.this boy still sees his father counting his breath& wants to learn how to peel sickness off his father’s skinbut there…
Alone in the Dark – Oladimeji Olatunji.
Alone in the Dark Alone in the dark, I’m scared of the imaginary beings spawned from make-beliefs and deepcontemplations. That eerie beast of the night lies in wait, ready to haunt me to death in mysleep.Like many others, I have awakened to the cruel realities of my past deeds, relentlesslystalking me. The skeletons, big and small. who walked to my doorsteps unheralded, have letthemselves in. I cannot undo them; I have remanded them to a wooden prison by my bedside.Yet, it won’t hold them for long.The emissaries of my mother’s probe will come knocking but fail in their attempted jailbreak,as her unstable emotions cloud her pursuit. She drifts into oblivion, lost in a world where Iwas everything but herself.At sunrise, they broke free, forcing me to mouth-pouring confessions, my skeletons revealedto a cynical world, exposing my failed grand scheme. My lover’s cat is out of the bag,running for safety, and…
Portrait of Home as an Indefinite Pronoun – Solahudeen Ridwanullah Olalekan
Portrait of Home as an Indefinite Pronoun In English class,Our teacher said redundancy flaws a paragraphWhen the sunrise in the evening,I call it a shadow of every legMade to walk away from whereThey used to call homeThat is the only pronoun I know for reluctance. Home is the only place we leaveWith pockets suspended by memories,Eggs we do not want to break to distanceOf faraway landsWhere displaced birds drenched by rain,Gather on street wiresAnd watch the storm cart away their nestsFor if it were home,They would’ve borrowed fire from the neighbouring kitchenTo warm the food. At home, no one beats a masquerade for trespassAt the worst, they’d show him the way back to the shrine. Contributor’s Bio Solahudeen’s writing evolves from thought, and so, a thinker was born in that land of virtue, Osun state, Nigeria. Ridwanullah is a lover of God and His creatures, including nature. Thusly, this preoccupated…
When Mercy Bids the Eye, Goodbye – Odunjo Azeez.
When Mercy Bids the Eye, Goodbye. Today, every eye spells evil and smells evil like the silenceworn by our nights. Out there, aubade greets the morningfrom a man’s stomach, and he dances to the tune—likehe buries his sadness into the joy that will never come. At the market, a preacher is preaching heaven with the blazeof hell in his mouth. We have pecked at the sea in hell andgraffitied its taste on our subconscious so that our ears, eyes,tongues, legs, and hands are all testaments of what we want and hate. Here, a liege leads his folks into days that are not smiling;flails them by bastinadoing till stars fall off their skies. We read and memorize the tongue of the sky, but rescindthe lessons or tell them off into the mouth of oblivion afterward.What rules our souls, our world is a rule: “if you want to rule, follow no rules!”…
Voyager – Tajudeen Muadh Akanbi.
Voyager the last time a boy writes himself into an hourglass of adventure, he scraps hopes and loss as a rephrased metaphor into his poem. a boy is lost in the adventures of mispronouncing /a/ as /ea/, like the cracks and conjectures of pain on his throat, it carries the colloquialism of colonial partiality- this is what happens when a schwa is a synonym to misplacement of the tonality in do-mi-do. this is how it feels to tie one’s lip to a white man’s mouth and our teeth mispronouncing the consonance in my assonance. he casts his tongue into the adventures of a boy sailing between the confluences of his mother tongue and remembers how he learns to recite ekun iyawo with the joys on his lip. this is an adventure of a boy captured in between the fights on his mouth, how his tongue is to learn how to read the…
Inebriation – Frank Njugi.
Inebriation & we come from a place where boys are proclaimed seers for saying a lower prayer lopsided by the characterization of drunkenness a Hart Crane’s floundering of one whose father’s face is the face of a grandfather a sloshing of an ancestral capillary, that is a saucer for carrying the margins of memory. The implications of wishes are unadorned dreams & so maybe Keli Goff should have written a play about inebriated ones; but because she didn’t we instead kowtow to the smog that blinds this air which unmoors our ancestry -to feel the warmth of a gone mother… Contributor’s Bio Frank Njugi is a Kenyan writer, page poet, and literary culture journalist living in Nairobi. His Micro-chapbook: Benthic is forthcoming in Konya Shamsrumi digital editions 2023). Some of his accolades include; being A Sondeka Award nominee in 2023, being longlisted for the Akachi Chukwuemeka Prize for Literature 2023, also shortlisted for the Ibua…
God’s Creations Are Little Shameful Things – Elisha Oluyemi.
God’s Creations Are Little Shameful Things darkness didn’t come firstelse, why would I have to hide in it? >>>>>in the beginning was light and sound light—to reveal my uncovered heelsParis’s arrow is biding timeAchilles wears a fool’s garment,why else would a warrior fail to watch out? sound—to tell us we have no place.silence makes god’s creations parallel withpillars in a dark hall:static, un-rattle-able, eternally swollen withloneliness >>>>>in the end was shame and hush. come. stand on the ruins of troy and all fallen powers.see, their eyes are rolled behind their lids as anemblem of shamelightning flashes, mocking the contempt the darkness concealsOcean Vuong calls the human eye ‘god’s loneliest creation’,and i tell you: itresists touch, resists company, and holds nothing, except tears.have you ever seen a boy drowning?why would he stick out his trembling hands if not that he needed a friend?lightning flashes, showing the boy the emptiness, the silence…