Poetry

                  There is so much              the streets/                    are really shaped like chapels
                                              blood on                 Large bullets
                 Many things I did not know until today
                   Like how many lives we will lose                          before this country annihilates us
                Hands fasten themselves on asphalt as                                        bullets whizz past
            Oh God, my people have learned to hide themselves.
           How can I dis – own a country without                                losing my head & my heart?
         Take me away he begged. This man is wounded!
             Blood gushing out of torn flesh
[I]                                        Was that a bomb blast or fire, the national anthem?

                    [Feel]         We are all growing violence, perhaps that is why they shoot at us

                 [Like]                                                             What is his name? Write it down

         [Puking]                                                                     He is going to die. Do CPR!

My sister weeps quietly beside me.  Tonight, a million Nigerians will cower in bed, tens

of millions will become lava.                                      He is breathing! He needs air!

Mark my words. We will all die together you know.                     We were born for it
 We should stop calling this nation [absent of motherly feelings] her.      An iron fist
 is an iron fist, wrapped or not.           They really bring hell fire & call it children toys
  Everything is baseless now.          See how they reduce us to mere flesh & empty
  cartridges. What is it with soldiers stealing corpses?  If I am burned,
                               We will sing our way into death.     Let me burn to the
                                                                                       Let heaven know           our land
                                 was too green with envy.                                            last
                               A man passes away from the                                       flicker
                             struggle.   Hallelujah. What am I to tell
                             my children unborn? That I hoped in
                              a country which pilfered like smoke
                                before my eyes or that I once
                                                 had a life?
Formatting: The Nigerian Map.

Anointing Obuh is a writer, singer and photographer from Nigeria. A one-time best of the Net nominee, her works have been featured in Rattle, Mineral Lit mag, Honey and Lime Lit, Barren magazine and elsewhere. You can find her tweeting @therealAnniekay.

Heaven is divinity’s finest theatrics
But
My creation is no play,

Though my mother
Formed me behind closed curtains
& my birth was like staging a scene for holocaust,
I am no drama.

What name do you give to children
Who caused their mothers to push into Eternity?

What is my identity if
I switched costumes with my mother in this plot twist called life?

She was cast as an extra for a judgement scene in her hospital robe

Nine months was the Audition for her role in this death series.

The scorching Sun is a portrait of
My mother’s wailing face,
The moon is her soul lighting up
My darkness.

& Every day I manage to squeeze out a prayer,
I ask God if salvation
Means taking a mother
Simply because He gave his son.

Roseline Mgbodichinma is a Nigerian writer whose works have appeared or are forthcoming in The African writer Magazine, The Hellebore, Serotonin Poetry, West Trestle Review, JFA human rights mag, Serotonin poetry, Indianapolis Review, Kalahari review, & elsewhere. She won the Audience Favorite award for the Union Bank Campus writing challenge – Okada books, she is  the third prize winner for the PIN food poetry contest and a finalist for the Shuzia Creative writing contest. You can reach her on her blog @ www.mgbodichi.com and Twitter @Rmgbodichinma.

she put her finger to my lips
said
this –
this dip here
this is from when they tell you to keep quiet
the split second before you fall to earth
flop out of a scarlet canal
scream yourself into the world
this is where that being
that Being
kisses
presses their finger
says
‘forget me’

 

Elizabeth Train-Brown, a circus performer and award-winning journalist, studies Creative Writing at Lancaster University. She is the Marketing Director for MPN Magazine and Poetry & Fiction Editor for Flash Literary Journal. She won the 2020 Literary Lancashire Award and has been shortlisted in competitions by Creative Writing Ink, Voices, and Beyond Borders Scotland. Her work has appeared in Planet in Peril (Fly on the Wall Press, 2019), The Future of Text (Future Text Publishing, 2020), Allegro, Tastzine, Qutub Minar Review, Cake Journal, SKYE Magazine, SCAN, Horla Horror, Wax Poetry & Art, and Crossways. www.bethtrainbrown.journoportfolio.com

“Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter”

                                                                                                                        – Chinua Achebe

Egwu adiro atu afo, oburu uzo.

My great-grandfather’s squinting eyes drew haze over the horizon belonging to my great-grandmother,
creating a painting of African sun.
She was a woman of the earth///the earth made woman of her
dirt laced fingers and sand peppered knees spoke love to corn and cassava
praying only to the god she held within her bosom.

At the rise of afternoon pestle etched callous as she pounded fufu into brown freckled mortar.
Like all men——-  my great-grandfather admired.
His yellowed eyes enchanted by her flat nose and cow belly plump lips
to her skin peeled ripe from ebony and hips swept wide for birth
to the sweet smell of a hardworking woman.

So he grew chest and three goats to bring back to her village
and she agreed to be his seventh wife.

Uto mmii wu ete bele.

Drums beat to the laughter of pot bellied men
wine carrying IS the wedding.

My great-grandfather squatted hidden in murraya bush leaves
while my great-grandmother’s feet kissed the ground to it’s pulsing rhythm
red wrapper bouncing to her waist
palm wine swimming in the ivory tusk of her forefathers.

She searched through purple plume grass and behind corkwood trees
only finding men pretending to be my great-grandfather.

Until the the rustle of murraya bush leaves seized her eyes
tusk weighed his hands
palm wine touched his lips
and a river stretched out around their families.

Mmanu akara di uto; onye ratu, ibe ya a ratu.

My great-grandfather’s land could make a village.
Splitting vast of dust rich colors.
For each wife had a house of her own
and they stuck together tightly
(clay, women, bamboo stick, children).
Leading to feasts that were long and winding~
sun fed siblings chasing behind the shadows of their mothers
and snapping stomachs waiting for their dent of garri to be filled with okra soup.
The open air hugging them tenderly.

 

*Translations

**the following are all Igbo proverbs in relation to which part of the story they were put in front of, but not all their meanings translate that well, when put into English.

*Egwu adiro atu afo, oburu uzo~ fear doesn’t affect the stomach, that’s why it’s always in front

*Uto mmii wu ete bele~ wine tastes sweeter when you dance

*Mmanu akara di uto; onye ratu, ibe ya a ratu~ bean cake oil is sweet, one who tastes should allow others to have a taste

 

Kechi Mbah is a high school junior and was born and raised in Houston, TX. She is the founder of her school’s poetry club, and recently started writing poetry for the page in August 2020. Her poems have appeared in The Incandescent Review and The Courtyard. She is a 2020 semifinalist in Space City Slam (Houston’s largest teen slam competition). In addition to writing poetry, some of her hobbies include: reading on the lawn chair outside, learning ASL, playing soccer, and participating in hackathons.

Halfway up the spiral of that spacecraft,
there it was — suspended at the level of
illusion, box after box after box
of white flower humming like an icemaker.
The closer you got, the louder and more
beautiful the human hand, the brushstrokes,
the flower, the flower, the flower. They hang
the paintings on a slant, flush with the floor
so that the viewers think the work is level.

Gridded out into the dark, the white flower —
not so perfect as to lose the human touch,
the artist starting with something perfect,
this is that something less-than which survived;
up close, the grid dissolves into the boxes,
the boxes fade away into the strokes,
oil, pigment spread across canvas — the hum,
fractals of grids and flowers and beauty.
Even the sloppiest of circles
conjures the perfect circle in our minds,
and every grid belongs with other grids:
anything more would be impossible.

After, I saw white flower everywhere:
crosswords, calendars, the subway map
guiding us back to the hotel room post-
Guggenheim. We took lazy shots then
you crashed into sleep. It was too hot
so I stayed up and counted tiles in
the purple dark, the afterimage still
humming in the aisles of my mind,
even on the bus ride home to Richmond:
white flower in the grid of windows,
the lattice of chain link fences, the sidewalks,
everywhere, packs of cigarettes re-
peating themselves over and over and
over behind the counter, all of it.

 

Grady Trexler is an undergraduate at Princeton University studying philosophy and linguistics. He is from Midlothian, Virginia. He is currently using a purple and white toothbrush.

I call blue!
After my friends and I make our way back from lunch,
we go straight to the old, broken down box,
worn from years of kids like us playing at indoor recess.
I sit on the cold floor with the boys
and we begin to play.
Our games are always heated, full of trash-talk
and petty arguments
but I come out on top.
“Sorry!” I say.
But we all know,
I’m not.

 

Jack Greenway is thirteen years old and goes to St. Patrick’s School in Rolla, Missouri. He wrote this poem because it shows his competitive nature in all of the games he likes to play – and in just about everything he does.