Guest Editors: Sarah Lubala and Logan February

Cover Design by Tochi Itanyi

As a writer and poet who calls themselves spiritual and maintains spiritual practices I hereby declare with outstretched arms, forehead to the belly of mother earth and wind as my ancestors that the literary bread of this work is ancestrally communal. The breadth, the ballad, the sonic structure of 20.35 Africa: Anthology of Contemporary Poetry Vol. VIII spans generations and defiantly plants itself in rich soiled pastures of won and lost kinship. Portals elevate rabbits to goddesses and cancers slow deaths to afterlives. Each poem kneels at the presence of heartbreak, severed umbilical cords or the knowing that can only be felt in the crux of a haibun’s prayer. Ase’. Every poem an intentional beaded work threaded by an omnipresent spell of words.

 

– Anastacia-Renee, Side Notes from the Archivist

Contents

Migration I – Rasheed Ayinla Shehu

Isn’t prayer a mirror of our lacks, our fears?
Mother and son observe the last ritual of departure:
the conviction that it might be another beautiful way
to name what makes her a widow; him, a fatherless child.

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Willingness – Chiagoziem Jideofor

always, we sing
odes to the participating ropes, odes to bodies climbing with stealth 
family is willingness to be cured, pruned out with bloody hands
more theories on superposition, the logic of layering

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What Happened – Fatihah Quadri

On the news, they said there are dark places beyond the sea; deserts of silence, islands of suffocation, rooms bursting with the thirsty laughter of a dead humor. That harmattan the river took two girls

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My Shift Begins at 7PM – Jasmine Tabor

the quiet intoxication / of abnegated passions / creates a sublime totality on velvet red rows / high above where laypeople sit / enjoying in spiritual revue / holding something honest / high, higher still / full of light / and god’s life.

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Addiction – Edoziem Miracle

the water of a bruised side victory
is mine but what is mine also runs after me
in naked hopeless streets
maybe salt is meant to be recycled
chased after as you lose yourself in the torrents

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Addiction II – Edoziem Miracle

wrap your fingers around the emptiness long enough and you learn how to thread ropes from nothing
for every falling is still a chapter in the scoring of living and you might learn something out of it

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