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,
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