AFRICA
Moods Aligned
Fagia the remnants of my chaos fagia-Sweep The first spurt of fearful thought Ili niweze kukueleza kwa kina So I can tell you in detail How I’ve fallen, where I’ve stolen Hatuwezi fukia maovu kwa ‘kazi tu’ We can’t bury …
A Benediction for Climbing Boys
1. Sometimes the chimney was hot or alight. They sent us up anyway, mostly naked. At night we, sleeping black, dreamt of the bakers on Lothbury, of tight flues and endless winding. The first time Jonny went up, there was …
White Noise
and where is the point at which penance comes knees bent with your name as absolution on its tongue we can only hope for something that knows, perhaps when we do not: the taste of clemency when the sentence is …
Introduction through Parables: Marwa
I was named after a well my sister, too after holy wells distant from each other we are distant from each other our mother didn’t intend it war is the frantic wet-nurse running between us we are both thirsty we …
The Whisper …
She would tell me In the space between heartbeats Feel the punch from earth Coursing through feet to your fingertips Alerting you to the whisper of touch Beckoning you to listen for the precision of creation Is there peace in …
The Staunch Slouch
An afternoon indoors but for sunbeams flecking the audience of relatives, it could be any evening any century before ‘Nigeria’ was coined to group the villages, the hundreds of thousands of families gathered where the wind is low, the rumbling …
Short Shorted / Odogbolu 1995
All this is fact / That Jebo had a knack for melodrama. That his slight weight barely marked That boarding school ground. That he was teased for his fair complexion. That he’d skim most crowds in search of me. That …
“Revival”
The gate-guard is at special attention positioned in highland chill new gold buttons and a collar hand-twined blanket in a dejected corner on the tables, reserve is hung and the meat devoured with the finest whiskies teasing the men teasing …
Composer
the Composer is a father of lullabies ostensible notes drank under waning light the tunes spread the hues of promise he is a herder of tongues and eardrums penning dreams while the earth generations bled for is cut up today …
The Book of God
I when the time came in that small world of half-woken stars and broken moonlight we were gathering palmnuts un-cracked palmkernels of previous years lying silent in the dust breeding thick and lice termites eating away detachable peelings and building …
Ugandan Golgotha
The rebel is all shield and sword, you are all flesh and feet. Already dead in this old Europe. A road of neon dirt grows towards a checkpoint. An Acholi soldier laughs in hyena soliloquy. Blood and wine from hills …
self-portrait in case of disappearance
i am afraid that everyone died & it did not fix the world this was meant to be the afterlife to the burning countries our mothers left behind girls with fathers gone or gone missing sistered to dark boys marked …
others
we begin because the worlds before ours ended sometimes abruptly sometimes in burning sometimes we survived & met sometimes i do not make it sometimes you get better first & feel burdened by my smell of smoke the dead root …
Smoke
When the mountains stared at our backs, it was my mother who read the sky, its cobalt glass full of moisture. The clouds formed a necklace at the summit. If I could remember the smell I would describe this as …
