I Watch You Transfigure – Kechi Nomu
Because days become un-demarcated, I have not learnt to master echoes or afternoons like this where we recall the years of earthworms slipping into our skins from slush. Making dragonflies dance the circus on empty clotheslines. I have been teaching myself to never forget our list of minor tragedies. In this house of dead bulbs […]
Last Night in Tawargha – Salawu Olajide
Last night, just like many nightsunder a blue shed, a blue horror was going on.Whatever happens to the characters in a story remains in it,Brecht calls this alienation effect. You want to spell loveso you tell your brother,Abid, not to return hometo become a ghost in the middle of Tripoli. Hear the […]
Loneliness – Romeo Oriogun
I do not want to write how lonely a car parked under the rain in a deserted road sings, but I’ve been on this road for ten years, searching for a boy to translate the sweetness in my language; searching for a door out of the fear sitting in my throat. Nothing is constant; birds […]
When My Mother Speaks of New Edition – Olatunde Osinaike
Partly because my stepfather-to-be three counties awaytexted her good morning and partly because the radioannounced the reunion tour happening this upcoming spring,she is giggling with that laugh in her voice that isrecognizable even through the other end of a phone call. Yes, that one. The one where you can tell there aredimples making […]
Folktales – Claudia Owusu
i am from blanket parachutes made out of midnight storms & city lights guiding 5 o’clock rush hours whether i like it or not, there is a rift on my tongue the size of a knife cut & every language i speak is born broken and jagged around the edges. at night, i sing myself […]
Be(coming) home to myself – Daad Sharfi
At the end of the night, I peel this country off my skin I peel the other one too I undress until I can call nothing but this body a home I choose absence of I choose border less I do not make boundaries of my being I become porous And always, Always Ready to […]
Tumeric – Alexis Teyie
And then peeling the turmeric, I said, as a girl- boy, I came upon a little dirty- grey bird on the way home, so I picked up the knot of feathers and slid it into my tunic pocket. He said, that’s odd, so I nodded, and kept working on the gnarled thing, but he didn’t […]
The Dead Bodies’ Artist – Ejiofor Ugwu
(for Aleppo) Ogodo paints dead bodies, they are now many in his gallery: he has used lungs of fireflies, and the vulture whose bald skull had beenbored into by dead flesh moths, he leaves a large expanse on his canvas to accommodate the network of brain wires that was left, gushed out, after the work […]
Fragile – Victor Ugwu
i understand howclocks work withbodies; mysister would tear her thigh with razors & force orange juiceinside. i like to watch themhealfor her to cut themagain. ∼ in my house,we threw things we wanted:my mother her left leg. ∼ my father’s body was simple,it had a lack my […]
Driving Lessons with My Father – Tryphena Yeboah
My mother’s voice makes youThink of past warsWhen she tells you to stir the soup,It’s as though she’s teachingYou how to hold a gunWhen she tells you to clean the room,It’s as though she’s trainingYou to pack for the day you have to run I turn twenty-three tomorrowAnd I still know nothing about […]