Voyager – Tajudeen Muadh Akanbi.
Voyager the last time a boy writes himself into an hourglass of adventure, he scraps hopes and loss as a rephrased metaphor into his poem. a boy is lost in the adventures of mispronouncing /a/ as /ea/, like the cracks and conjectures of pain on his throat, it carries the colloquialism of colonial partiality- this is what happens when a schwa is a synonym to misplacement of the tonality in do-mi-do. this is how it feels to tie one’s lip to a white man’s mouth and our teeth mispronouncing the consonance in my assonance. he casts his tongue into the adventures of a boy sailing between the confluences of his mother tongue and remembers how he learns to recite ekun iyawo with the joys on his lip. this is an adventure of a boy captured in between the fights on his mouth, how his tongue is to learn how to read the…
Riddles of a Lost Boy. – Asíwájú Babatimehin
Riddles of a Lost Boy I am something— wandering is my native heirloom. my ancestors, shifting lands & shape-shifting tongues. all oduduwa’s milk & honey not sufficing to quench their thirst for new land. the result: a minor(ity) problem. a leaf has fallen too far from its tree. a people in Kogi torn apart from their heritage by the thin lines that shape states. wandering is a family heirloom. I wandered from my culture as a seed in my father’s balls in search of greener pastures to plant me. which is to say I was a nomad before I was born. drifting through cities: Abuja, Lagos, Ibadan, and Kaduna. two…