Rebellion on Lent Morning – Damilare Popoola
let God bear the weight of my nights.
my ma says it is sin to make God
my errand boy. a prayer is no prayer
if it makes God do my bidding.
there is a place for such prayers
Synaesthesia – Catherine McNaught Davis
ecstasy cascades and floods
love as lust as lava, molten in my core
seething, all-consuming scarlet
as my blood becomes me
indignance to rage to roaring fury
you cannot do this to me
Towards the End – Naomi Nduta Waweru
the missal: top most compartment of the medicine cabinet.
i’m thinking about belief.
and how cancer cells take their time in the host. also: slow deaths.
and afterlives.
Eskista – Hiwot Adilow
I finger a masenqo and sing
this meadow buds with ballads
butterflies tonguekiss
my eyelids are heavy with nectar
one stomp of your foot wakes me
my eyes never leave your pulse
Feeling Fucked Up – Hiwot Adilow
fuck Nostalgia and brass
fuck madiba makeba fuck jazz
fuck history and the ties that bind
fuck the fingers that play and
your hands that mapped and digitized desire fuck
Patrice – Loic Ekinga
Patrice asks why the word martyr is spelled the same in French and English
I don’t know, I say. I tell him that it originates from the old Greek word for witness.
But he knows this already. He’s quiet.
Ballad of an Ibibio Poet – Felix Eshiet
At dawn, she watches the river mist rise,
ears twitching at the silent voices only she hears.
The elders say spirits favor small bodies,
that power wears a soft skin so no one sees it coming.
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.
Jalopy – Solape Adetutu Adeyemi
Some of us own the tyres
Some of us own the dashboard
The seats plus the seat belts!
Even the engine!
The brakes and accelerator, inclusive!
Just so you remember
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
Self-Portrait as Bone in Three Lives – Chiagoziem Jideofor
after the war when i became this human
too wrecked for credit, wilting and in dire need of help
with a face of shame; its full material
my rambunctious descriptions of home within a house
Rattus’ Haibun – Chinaza James-Ibe
I will live my death and kill my life. I, crater. I, liar. I, thief. From the crepuscular corners of my rotting mouth, I pus you. Glorify the bloated dead & poison & glue-board & trip-wire & cheese-trap & murder
