Featured – Page 2 – swamp pink

Three

The Woman Long before she became a mother, the woman was a little girl living with her parents in a compound shared with five other families. The compound had belonged to a landlord before it was confiscated and reallocated to a state-owned hardware company, to house its employees and their families. None of the original furniture...

Reverse Abecedarian (II)

Zugzwang in chess means the compulsion to move, means You must move but all moves are losing moves. Move X and it leads to mate. Y and you lose your queen. And When I decided not to move, not to respond to the Violence of being spoken to or touched, I lay  Unblinking on my sofa while the paramedics  Tapped my shoulder repeatedly, as if...

House of Michael

I must have been so tired, so utterly exhausted, that I accidentally fell asleep in a stranger’s bed and slept through the entire party. In the morning, in the kitchen, everyone was exceptionally friendly and nice about it, and they even offered me fresh squeezed juice for breakfast. Embarrassed because I hadn’t properly registered any names,...

Future Tense

Given the signs and wonders, the bleeding moons and whatnot, I inventory the cupboards: a small cylinder of nutmeg, two cans of tuna packed in oil, an old brick of brown sugar, birthday candles, elbow macaroni, oyster sauce. No heads of cattle, no vacuum-sealed heirloom seed, no talisman apropos for the dimming of days, just rain boots and drawers full of dead batteries and rubber bands....

Friendly People

A few months ago, before we exchanged hot and humid Lagos for grey and wet Seattle, the husband fell asleep to a playlist he’d curated of male immigration influencers mandating what-not-to-do the moment one’s Nigerian foot touched foreign soil. His earphones were still intact when I found him limp, but I noticed his ear canals were red...

Present Tense

The flute is older than the wheel and once was just as everywhere: on your back idling in some fescue meadow or bent, picking over cobble on a steel-gray shore or upright, watching streams of wolves depart a spent kill—you would hear it, and it would carry you.

The End of Elegy

Heul, how. How, howl. The wolf-me fjords my anatomy into an ambage assemblage, sunders to Bone and Spirit: archaic, famined, sounding in space. Peregrinations ruining in this runic, nacred Wen umbrage me into a brute, a wild beast, resolute lycanthrope cruising the center of a Capital bedeviled by all that which I will and will ever not claim. I feel rather like the End of Elegy. Death...

HORSEPOWER

Since that collision we call “conception”, I have always been a body inside a body. I was 14 the first time I had control of my carrier, the same age I discovered speed and direction. From inside the body, I controlled velocity. All that is to say, I learned how to drive. Before the engine:...

Love: Greek to Me

It’s an alphabet from another galaxy. Like an ecstatic idiot, I try to listen through a telescope, expecting logic in the hysteria of a typhoon. Often it’s just a furious dialogue between a hippopotamus and a rhinoceros. The cataclysmic chorus of hubris. A hemorrhage. Why do we expect nectar then need morphine? It starts out an orchestra. An Olympic-sized orgy. Sometimes ending in a visit to the clinic. It’s supposed to be epic. Cardiac ambrosia. But we’re more hypochondriac than hero. More panic than music. All...

Allelopathy

In which one plant exudeschemicals to suppress anotherspecies. The cunning violenceof red nature. See the chloro-phyll fail, the vine etiolate:God’s dubious acre, the acre’sdubious god. How, now, wehave published toxicity. Stilldays in winter, the photo-chemical smog, rusty as marrow’sown begun blood. Air comescold off the Benguela.We should say ‘perishing’,but for the length of a morningit...

love after divorce

before you I was a diligence purist unerringly vigilant I strode to & fro in my ruined rooms where did it go the pitch-perfect rhyme the unfailing order & ardor of each dusty fixed form that restrained me from taking an axe to the roots of the tree I was sitting in in whose dying arms I finally found myself cradled & rocked by you now if any order remains it must be subcellular a calm I can’t see but must...

Transpacific Love Story

Emptying the truck was Seung-Pyo’s first job in America: passing cardboard boxes through gradations of night letting them fall upon the belt with the arrhythmia of raindrops. The stopwatch throbs like a headache worsened by the fluorescent bulbs which glare like no natural thing. The rain doesn’t let up. Routing the bruised packages was his second job. One per second: no romantic metaphors here. Enveloped...