Smiles do not fall.
Smiles do not fall into our creased palms like raindrops, yet dark clouds loom overhead, like a catastrophe hinging off God’s little finger. This is yet another poem about grief. Sometimes, I wonder why we squander
Run, little one.
There weren't always dragons in the valley, but we may not have known because this one was human. We could not believe our eyes and ears when we heard it. It was like being in a riot. Our Chieftain jumped up,
To you, a boy grieving. How does it taste?
They say the tongue is three times more incisive & sweeter than the blade or honey, so you thrust sugar into your words, splitting gratitude into syllables: Al ham du li llah. That is to say, the palm tree hurls
Death and Other Unfamiliar Things.
A man, once dead, is a musical instrument bereft of songs. A song, when unsung, is a silkworm refusing to spawn. In biology class, the lecturer informs us the mouth develops from a buccopharyngeal
This Man, These Men.
He is dancing. This man. He dances in the darkness of his room, the remnants of dusk streaking in and forming a faint silhouette of him seen from the outside. He bends and rises, winds and writhes, he thrusts too
Home is anywhere the body speaks stillness.
Regardless, we are all mocked by pain, the black painting of the night heavy like the weight of our grief. But because a promise is another lie named after bravery. I choose to survive before the devil laughs
We’re still the same ones dancing.
Ọka is always eager to break into rain. There, the clouds gray quickly, rounding and spawning drops of rain before you can catch your heart. The rain falls passionately. It gathers pace and rhythm,
The Thunderbolt Wife.
Alhaji Kayode ate the masquerade’s meal on a Sunday morning, in the early hours of twilight, when the clouds were devoid of the celestial bodies. Loud wails emerged from his
Pharaoh’s Syndrome.
I saw the Lord one evening inside a brittle nap I wrought at the expense of a dough of a poem. & I became restless and restless trying to recall both the poem and the vision.
The News Arrives Dressed in Blood and Bridesong.
The news came in hips first— wide, bruised, the way a mother breaks before her child can finish a scream. It came with the scent of pinky wounds, blood bright as gossip in a girl’s ear,
A Story the Body Keeps Telling.
My body has somehow become a site of struggle. The one place that was supposed to hold me wholly and without condition–that should have been mine tenderly and entirely–has now become a mutiny, out of control,