Ashawo Glory – Joemario Umana.
Ashawo Glory Within Mama Wire-wire’s drinking palour, the bamboo walls wear the garment of night, the air the smell of tobacco breath and palm wine belch. Flavour N’abania’s ashawo blurts out from the speakers and everyone cheers. Littered here and there are men, drowning their worries down their throat with kegs, some bottles and some smoking, as if to say to their troubles, there, vanish with the smoke in my lungs and in the air. There are women here too, those who make blood rush between a man’s thighs, and are ready to milk a man for a price, maybe a meal. From a distant corner, a man’s words nibble my ears, I could read pain in his words, like a palmist divining destiny, from the lines etched on a palm. There’s a proverb among my people that says, it’s condition that bends the crayfish, so I call out to…
A Birdsong -Fasasi Ridwan.
A Birdsong I want to make more memories with you but it seems I’m fading into the ones we had already. — Fasasi Ridwan The apparatus that made my body stay in hibernation throughout those years must have been living like a prey standing miles away from hope. Or It must have been that I have become adapted to being an outcast all my life. I mean the weight of these haunting memories must have pulled my soul away from my body. Every night, we filled the air with Fireboy & Joeboy songs, dirges for lovers whose night is covered in imaginations. Your body was rigid —rubbing against mine, against time. How my lips used to get drown in the river of your mouth. How the night watched us in admiration. How the moon was jealous of our shadows that it casts away its light from us. Say, the night…
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…