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,
Constitution for Boys on How a Bullet Works.
I bury the skin of dead people in my mouth, push their collected illiteracy down my throat, and watch my body rot for countless boys that sought the constitution on how a bullet works.
Shadows in the Dark.
My father Atti was late again. And for a sane moment, I imagined him running away from his family. If he wasn’t, why the incessant disappointments? Why refuse to show up when he had promised to
And My Cup Run-over.
Today, I pray in twenty-one languages, the ones I unearth from my neighbor’s tongue. I smoke my room with seven incense sticks, to test the sight of God, the sight of him anytime my life dresses
My Face is a Portrait that Bears my Father’s Name.
On Saturday mornings, I am stirred awake by the fragrance of fresh akara, the oily sweetness filling my nostrils like a perfume wafting off a young girl’s purse. But that Saturday, I was awoken not by that,
Between Haram and Iniquity.
I mirror the entirety of myself in a pocket-sized gadget as counterfeit from foreign materials. These days, my flesh bleeds the odor of shortage, forged by the economist who reeks of poverty
Something thicker than blood.
Water and fire are said to be arch-enemies, the unresolvable dissension between them as profound and age-old as that between light and darkness. In the words of your grandmother, “You cannot…
In the Hollow of Grief.
It’s been seven years since night dispossessed me & claimed you as its own, your eyes remain forever bland, forever closed to dawn. At your grave, the earth opened its mouth widely…
Dancing on a Minefield.
They say God knows best, so they pass the pepper soup and turn the volume up. Laughter, loud and reckless, tumbles through the compound, bounces off the brown roof, spills into the streets,
Finding Halima.
The café was louder than usual, with the continued clicking of keyboards, the soft music looping under jumbled conversations, and the occasional hiss of the coffee machine.