Guest Editors: Sara Elkamel and Bhion Achimba
Cover Design by Tochi Itanyi
Poetic interventions that involve the solicitation, editing, curating, and even publishing of poets are rare in any culture. On the African continent, where it is cost prohibitive, it is even rarer. This makes this volume even that much more spectacular and necessary, and one could even say miraculous. The editors here have worked tirelessly and with little support to achieve this. What also brings a certain joy to me is that there are so many poets working still, even within that uneven and uncertain field of reward, enough to fill a volume like this. And not just as a matter of quantity, but also with enough quality and the reflexive work ethic that is needed to meet the rigors of the process and emerge on the list of the included here. A conspiracy of a lot of hard work and larger graces. The short volume, just twenty-three pages, spans the entire continent. The range and reach of poets, against the range and reach of the individual aesthetics is impressive. It’s the kind of volume that one hopes hotels and even restaurants will leave in guest rooms, tucked beneath dusty Bibles, or folded into menus. What a discovery and surprise that would be. Speaking of surprises, lines like “nothing / touches the floor for fear of being buried,” from Ethiopian poet, Aam – Fahad Al-Amoudi; “All the blood is a black road through the sea,” by Ghanaian poet, Sarpong Osei; “it grows pain into a field of wildflowers,” by Praise Osawaru are striking and jump out of strong poems that introduce, at least to me, poets I had no previous encounter with. I admired the attempts Ajibola Tolase’s pidgin poem made to push the limits of language. All in all, this installment of this project is strong, and a must read. I look forward to seeing these poets flourish in single stand-alone books.
— Chris Abani, Smoking the Bible and Sanctificum
I try to tell her who I love, how I love. Where I am holding the shame. But now she is gone. I call out to her and she does not answer. The conversation turns ghost in my mountain heart, next to all the others I buried from the women I love. Then there are graves I am left to think about
let’s agree that loss is a chained rock pulling
the body to the riverbed.
& it grows pain into a field of wildflowers.
& the tongue becomes a sponge of saltwater.
I catch a dove looking at us from a light pole
& I think of it as an angel in disguise
Once a year, revisiting
the possibility of my absence being permanent,
my mother recounts the story of how I almost became
a cautionary tale. About seven, I wandered off,
becoming anonymous in the cacophony
of the Cairo train station
Weekends at Limbe beach sucking
the flesh off roasted mackerel fish,
long holidays in the village with my grandparents,
pulling groundnut out of the earth, raking my hands
through bunches, feeling the slight pressure of the soil
caked under my fingernails.
he first tells me i ask him to recount again, the night sky, because i am not looking laterally, at this memory, we do not discuss, how he slept on tarpaulin, instead i draw new, star signs, unseeing of the ground
sometimes we watch scenes of a refugee camp turning ember
Uncle leaves the door ajar outside,
dawn ricochets off the mountain faces
into the shop, kicking up everything left behind.
All the clothes hang by their nape on the racks;
dust sweeps up the shoes; nothing
touches the floor for fear of being buried
A man confesses, my country is killing me, and it is forever.
The greatness of horror is in tense. Beauty and terror preening before hourmirrors.
A man confesses, I loved. I loved this land, and his broken heart leaps off the edge breaking hearts inch towards.
I sit in the hours before lullabies shut my eyes, taking census of my sorrows—the tenderness lost, the boisterous children who turn my mind on itself, the silence after a good joke, the period swollen with distance in a lover’s postscript, the fickle warmth of touch, the October earth offering water before a corpse fills its mouth
How her broom combs the sand into strips,
the swish of her strokes, the crescent
of her back, the integrity of her wrists.
Footsteps so light, they rebut gravity.
The taillight of her husband’s okada disappears in the distance
Not this. Not this loneliness swelling
like a boil, the shiv of insomnia drilling into the scalp.
The neighbors think they are quiet, but love
exposes everything the way light does. On
the other side of the wall, I am pulling through the night
Na person daddy lie down for street so. The pain pass my power.
I try hol’ am. I no fit. Water wey pour for my eye
reach to baf. Police say make we no waka for late hour.
Say dem go kill us finish. Remember say all die
I rub myself with more lotion than normal. If I am dying inside,
I want to, at least, be shiny on the outside.
An unkindness of raven perched on the barren tree—
I do not understand the language of their songs
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