The Wolf Howls for Her Death Mission -Enit’ayanfe Ayosojumi Akinsanya.
The Wolf Howls for Her Death Mission hearth i’m stuck where indigo shadows play & the light is terse & half glimpses dance like prints of a dark blue moon or like leaves leaving a lonely sky when branches are too weak to carry the stories of night sway, sway i don’t know when i will become it, but i feel it earth i listen to the doors closing o p e n i n g speaking the rain is sand on my soul bury, bury if these bones & stones do not smother me, then i can catch you in her bed, in her deep i can clutch winds of new watch altered longings leap to flame in me—feral i am the wolf that will howl her death mission that will hear the gong of wisdom somewhere in the thick of these moon-deadened leaves that will say: don’t. quiet!…
Portrait of a Bleak Future – Okoronkwo Chisom.
Portrait of a Bleak Future Today, I held a clandestine meeting with the voices in my head & they went berserk. The disarray disrobed me of light. Say, my heart assumed the silhouette of a woman nurturing her aches like a tender tulip in the dead of night. I’m docile to nothing but growth. Once, I was faced with a conundrum that has the shape of my father’s demon. To escape, I mounted the back of a wind ferrying away my fears. There’s no safety here. Every danger that confronts me comes with a dagger. There’s a sun scorching the leaves of my hopes to make them wither. Don’t blame this heart when it rejects a hope capsule. There’s not enough water to irrigate the florescent petals of my dreams that fight for survival in this land. Yesterday, I broke through the barricade of my future & lost gusto. To bask in…
When Mercy Bids the Eye, Goodbye – Odunjo Azeez.
When Mercy Bids the Eye, Goodbye. Today, every eye spells evil and smells evil like the silenceworn by our nights. Out there, aubade greets the morningfrom a man’s stomach, and he dances to the tune—likehe buries his sadness into the joy that will never come. At the market, a preacher is preaching heaven with the blazeof hell in his mouth. We have pecked at the sea in hell andgraffitied its taste on our subconscious so that our ears, eyes,tongues, legs, and hands are all testaments of what we want and hate. Here, a liege leads his folks into days that are not smiling;flails them by bastinadoing till stars fall off their skies. We read and memorize the tongue of the sky, but rescindthe lessons or tell them off into the mouth of oblivion afterward.What rules our souls, our world is a rule: “if you want to rule, follow no rules!”…
Inebriation – Frank Njugi.
Inebriation & we come from a place where boys are proclaimed seers for saying a lower prayer lopsided by the characterization of drunkenness a Hart Crane’s floundering of one whose father’s face is the face of a grandfather a sloshing of an ancestral capillary, that is a saucer for carrying the margins of memory. The implications of wishes are unadorned dreams & so maybe Keli Goff should have written a play about inebriated ones; but because she didn’t we instead kowtow to the smog that blinds this air which unmoors our ancestry -to feel the warmth of a gone mother… Contributor’s Bio Frank Njugi is a Kenyan writer, page poet, and literary culture journalist living in Nairobi. His Micro-chapbook: Benthic is forthcoming in Konya Shamsrumi digital editions 2023). Some of his accolades include; being A Sondeka Award nominee in 2023, being longlisted for the Akachi Chukwuemeka Prize for Literature 2023, also shortlisted for the Ibua…
Sickling Through for Soul Balms – Chinemerem Prince Nwankwo.
Sickling Through for Soul Balms & in the morning,we slid like ornaments glittering with oversized adjectivesin the follicles of our father’s praise.We warmed our teeth in tinted happiness, wellingup as butterflies fluttering in the country of father’s body.We’re a host of glow-wormsin which our father’s grief diminishes ingreen light. Day by day, we sneak intothe taste buds of our father’s rattling prayers,spurning spicules of reminisces fruiting in us, fears.Admit grief, father is a balcony of abstract gardens,where love blooms like soft petals of homestead flowers.& his humor, streaming like fine wines in which our trifling tempests ferments.O, how sweet to find fragility cradling in the chaotic arms of fatherhood,leaving us wrapped in the foliage of succor.Holding forte, we prune this wild, sickling through —not for acinus or vesicles but for soul balm. Contributor’s Bio Chinemerem Prince Nwankwo is currently an undergraduate of History and International Studies, University of Uyo, Uyo,…
Victim of Metamorphosis – Olaseni Kehinde.
Victim of Metamorphosis From my grandmother’s lips spills the story of my genesis, A home of beauty buried in time’s embraceLike a mother hen, protective with chuckling wings,Our home was peaceful when evil slumbered And fresh air blew with innocence, Cupidity flew like a whisper in the windHonour stood tall in the mountainsThose nights before love faded into memories How can I write an elegy for my dear land? Bristling in despair and gasping for breathA shatterer of hope in a ruthless whim,As a mighty flood rages my home with vices Today, I live in a terrain of predators, Hawks perch, eavesdropping on prey’s dreamsAnd some mornings, they swoop from the sky,To devour great dreams like a tasty meal Riffles serenade the air with dreadful melody, Striking out futures in cold bloodElders covet riches, honesty withers,On a sobbing land, wailing for aid. Contributor’s Bio Olaseni Kehinde Precious is a prolific poet,…
A Memory of a Man Drowned by the New Ways – Rasheed Ayinla Shehu.
A Memory of a Man Drowned by the New Ways I sit with my grandfatherWhile the half-moon illuminates throughThe darkness of the night.We chatter, like birds cherrypicking between cerealsWith their beaks rummaging in our lane of thoughtA memory to fill the gaping spaceA blackness in our white dentitionOf the generation between us.A night like this, with another half of the moonBuried in the belly of the ravenous sky birthsScores of memories – a bit of us dead in the past,Reincarnating in a form in the present.We do have a picture of a shark opening his jawTo house the drowning us in his belly for food:A period to unseal a pulsating wound,To seek survival in its yellowish pus. “I wish he had traveled in a caravan just like me,” Grandpa muttered.“Through the thickness of the forest, the heatsOf the sun, heading towards the Sahara;Balanced on a gasping camel with the height…
Shapes of no more – Osagiede Best.
Shapes of no more Victor Uwaifo said: you buy shirt shirt tears if God creates soul soul will go back to its owner the body that we use minimally would turn sands so i could not tell you to stay & if i break cascades down goodbye, goodbye handful of body-sands thrown to the teeth of a starving abyss i won’t cry for I know i could not hold back your slipping away not that this washes away any pain so many things i want to say to you just yesterday, Papa & i writing the biography of you you again felt the weight of those three tubers of yam on your head as you put the soles of your feet on the footprints of your father trekking miles away to the object of desire again you in your childhood backyard when the darkness of noon came with a 1947…