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…
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…
A TALE OF MIGRATORY LOCUSTS & HOLOCAUST
They said the moon would weep with us when death eats supper in our huts but as soon as the sun slept off, she sharpened the claws of the stars &led them to our huts Watch how you hold the words of this poem ‘cos…
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…
Solitude: A Poem By Ehi-kowochio Ogwiji
On the shelf of solitude, silence is a book, with black & white pages, telling stories which died on their way to the village square; like that of Enem Ogodoo, the one who spent a lifetime, oiling a flute which would play the first note…
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…
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…
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…
Death is not another color of light
Do not tell me that death is an anaerobic sleep, And like the whale which swallowed Jonah, It’d spew my son at the tideless shore of bliss, Just to muffle my mournful wail! If you must, let your coffin first sail on a sea of…
The door creaked again, last night
like the night before, i crawled under our bed, from where i watched them; cut my brother’s arms, smash my father’s testicles, plant iron seeds in mama’s thighs & left me a glass of fresh milk. — that night, death was with me & he…