Always a joy to watch a poet recycle dark emotions and make something stunning out of them. Franklyn Orode, the author of Ashes of Orange Dreams, does this so effortlessly in his poem, Haunted Room.

– Editorial Team

This room is now a shrinking continent

A vast watery deep of prickling emptiness

Where our tongues once spew large fireballs

And made us burnt boys in dancing flames

Our faces, being cemeteries of buried fingers

From awaken embers of sleeping volcanoes

Two solitary figurines hugging tightly their umbra

Sipping oxygen from brimming floods of silence

This place is just too cramped a country for two

It was before these deities we fought the last war

When I died with your scalpel stuck on my back

Still I rise with your name clenched on my fists

And make a photo album for your ugly gods

I can still perceive the stench of our memories

My blood stains on your carnivorous conscience

We are back again like birds with broken wings

Still trying to pluck you out of my nervous system

For this generous stab you lovingly gave to me

I wish the moon would snatch me away to her room

And let me find sleep on her matrimonial bed

Some where far far away from this haunted room

About The Author

Franklyn Orode is a creative writer from Nigeria having a strong bias for poetry and prose. He is a graduate of civil engineering from the University of Benin. He sees poetry as a way of finding momentary escape from the vicissitudes of life. Franklyn’s works have been published on Eboquills, SprinNg, poetry cooperative, PIN, WRR, and elsewhere. He is the curator of the covid-19 themed poetry anthology EARTH ON A WHEELCHAIR and also the author of ASHES OF ORANGE DREAMS his first published poetry collection. Franklyn writes from anywhere his engineering practice takes him to.