Poetry

A Letter to Dawn 

As soon as mama weaned me
Papa stood by the corners of my mouth
With a gourd, full of wisdom
And told me; “Drink, my child, drink!
For life is a journey through a desert
Where there are no oases.”

Poetry

Come Watch Me, Dance Naked 

Jaachi, I am the tree which died in the seedlings you refused to tend. I am a memory you cannot drown in a keg of palm-wine, for like a feather, I will float upon the rivers of your thoughts till you recall and regret the night when you abandoned a broken flute at the village square, for I am that flute and wholeness found me in the hands of a drummer boy who lost his drumsticks.

Poetry

Bonfire 

God is like that favorite red dress she got on her tenth birthday. she loves it so much but it no longer fits. Her father never stopped saying she was a poem he wrote in her mother’s body & forgot its lines. So when he…

Poetry

BRITTLE 

my father’s voice is a dark hole. when I was six, I fell into it, tasted his liquid darkness and I became a light- too bright for the prying eyes of dawn. In my sojourn, I have climbed seven mountains of tears and crossed ten…

Poetry

Derivatives of Silence 

. a lady is holding god’s obituary- she painted it on a canvas of pain with the crayons of his silence she is saying; “i’m not an artist but i watched god die in the tears of a little boy, who was born with a…

Fiction

Irene II 

Both Ehi and Blessing were at Irene’s funeral last weekend. Clad in sparkling white knee-length gowns, hands folded across their chest, they stood by her graveside. Blessing was crying- no- wailing so loudly that Ehi was beginning to feel like her heart was hewn from…

Fiction

Irene I 

To hold a pen bearing the world’s weight- this is what it takes to be a writer.- To easily detect the footprints of tears blurred out with many layers of make-up and see a person’s sincere hunger for laughter is a familiar scene in her…

Fiction

Flickering rays and a beam 

Chi is wedged between a wooden table and a leather chair close to the window of her self-con apartment, down the ever-quiet Engineer Kitchener’s Street. Raymond, her boyfriend was keen on getting her an apartment on this street because he knew the serenity would mean…