Grief, memory, love. And the indifference of the natural world.
Featured poem
Dust as grammar. The dry season as a kind of punctuation the body cannot refuse.
Read poem →Dust as grammar.
The dry season arrives
with its own punctuation—
a comma between
what was green
and what is not.
The body learns to read it:
cracked lips as parentheses,
the itch behind the eyes
an ellipsis,
waiting.
01
On water, impermanence, and the places that hold us even as we leave them.
02
A language borrowed and returned transformed. What survives translation and what is made new.
03
On the hour before rising, and what the body carries before language arrives.
04
The birds do not mourn you, and the sun spins on, indifferent to your inconsequence in the vast earth.
05
Waiting becomes grief only when the train departs and you realize at last what you had been standing there for.
06
Family to run to or from, friends who hold your shadow, happiness self-measured, and love to heal by.
07
If love were truly lodged within your chest, I should feel its heat the way damp air foretells rain.
08
In January the harmattan dust returned to cover everything, and the speaker surrendered a heart that needed tending.
09
Lavender seeps through every song and poem, making each day's end another failed attempt at forgetting.
10
Her mother taught her to smile with lips and never let it reach her heart, so she never gave her name.
11
A woman whose hair smelled of lavender left only her scent and a name she never surrendered.
12
When all else falls away, only three things hold their weight: poetry, music, and love.
13
In this small town every destination is a fifty-naira bike ride away, though he's in no hurry to test the last one.
14
There may be no good death, but the worst is the one that takes you before you even see it coming.
15
Rain in Eket falls without regard for occasion, soaking Sunday clothes and sorrow with equal indifference.
16
He slipped the moment she sat down beside him into a happiness jar made from an old lotion container.
17
Something in the darkness knew how to whisper your name until it hollowed out the space where your soul should be.
18
Every passing of No. 33 fills the windows with her painted face and a lifetime of unpursued what-ifs.
19
Childhood laughter and the tap of machetes on fallen palms fade when cracked lips taste only the bus window's dust.
20
An orange sun shoves the clouds aside and sits on them, quietly unsettling every certainty about which way is east.
21
Stay and let me bask in your laughter while death wanders nearby, an unwilling pilgrim looking for rest.
22
An old man's will insists he be buried where he called home, defying every tradition but his own.
23
Their breathing never aligns, and in the gap between his inhale and her exhale, he finds what he loves most.
24
Love paints every picture of your existence and then slips away before the canvas has time to dry.
25
Light rises at every dawn and flees at dusk, freely given to all and only sometimes hidden by cloud or decree.
26
Sun chases the moon away each morning while weary workers trudge toward a tomorrow holding all their buried dreams.
27
Morning mist clings like last night's guilt while the city hums around someone still walking and not quite awake.
28
A bent man stares at an obituary, his poverty mirrored in the dead man's face, wondering when his own turn will come.
29
A protest again consolation and choosing to wallow in grief