Akpata Magazine

Category: ISSUE 1

  • The Blue Bird Left No Joy on X – Agboola Tariq A.

    in a video,
    i watch how chaos chases a boy from home.
    on the runway,
    a rifle points him towards heaven’s gate
    & a bullet catches up with him.
    like a pinball arcade,
    a boy is fired into strange horizons
    & the only way home is a road that leads nowhere.
    in a country not far from here,
    blood has washed humanity off its borders.
    bones are mistaken for bricks,
    pandemonium sways like pendulum,
    rockets swinging from both sides,
    & there, a boy stuck at the center of chaos,
    where the only thing that brings light is fire.
    he watches how fire eats up his home
    & doesn’t spare his family.
    tears flowing into storm,
    but it isn’t enough to kill the fire.
    in another video,
    a girl is badly hurt.
    her voice
    collapsing like her father,
    her home, her country.
    her body, buried under burning clouds,
    becomes a log of hope.
    & the birds,
    have taken all that’s left of it.           

    Image Credit: Starboyscotty

    Author’s Bio

    Agboola Tariq A., Swan II, is an unfolding poet from Western Nigeria & an undergraduate student of law at the University of Ibadan. He explores in his writing, self / identity & spaces he occupies. Some of his works are forthcoming/in Brittle Paper, Eunoia Review, Olumo Review, IceFloe Press, The Hellebore Press, Variety Pack, Fiery Scribe Review, The Poetry Journal & elsewhere.  He tweets: @Agboola_Tariq_A

  • Famished – Ikechukwu Henry

    Life’s bitterness persists, an unrelenting stream of woes akin to a newborn’s initial grasp on a mother’s breast – feeble and uncomprehending. The weight of its despair becomes truly apparent only when you venture into the once bustling Ụmụdi market, tasked with getting the cooking ingredients carefully whispered into your ears by your mother. “Buy a  packet of Maggi seasoning, three bulbs of onions, a bounty of catfish, and the modest elegance of periwinkles,” her words lingered, albeit with a painful residue as her hands relinquished their grasp. 

    In your community, the specters of destitution and famine have taken residence, perched like a vulture upon a camwood tree. The community now embraces these grim companions with a reluctant cordiality. The once-vibrant Ụmụdi market, a hub of bustling commerce, has faded into a shadow of its former self. It evades description, for fear that articulating its decline would magnify its lamentable state.

    You navigate the labyrinthine market, sidestepping puddles left by last night’s rain, the same rain that had serenaded your sleep beneath the haven of your bed covers. The pre-dawn hush was heavy, laden with the scent of moistened earth, as the moon retreated, its light borrowed from the sun.

    “Mind where you dey go! If my wares fall, you’ll pay,” a vendor chides, rousing you from your reverie. 

    “Sorry, sorry.” Apologies fly from your lips as you survey the nearly deserted market.

    Your journey leads you to the onion lane, a sight you’ve grown accustomed to, yet this time only two sellers grace your vision—your customer excluded. Undeterred, you approach a Hausa vendor, perched upon a large mat adorned with an assortment of onions.

    “How much for this?” you gesture toward a cluster of four modest bulbs of onion, their dimensions scarcely surpassing those of limes. The vendor arches an eyebrow, his gaze darting across his array of onions as if the one you’ve indicated eludes his sight. A memory surfaces—your younger brother, Chidiebere, often played this same game when tasked with fetching specific ingredients for your mother’s culinary creations. His eyes would dance above the exact spot she pointed at, a charade that brought amusement to you and vexation to her. He would linger there for so long and your mom had to check whether he was subtracting the meat she intended to use to cook. 

    “Ebere, What’s holding you?” she would ask, her hands posed akimbo.

    “Mum, I can’t see the onions you said I should bring,” he would whine and your mom had to muffle her chuckle, staring at the onions that lay right between them.

    “Look at it here before I beat the hell out of you.” she would point but Ebere’s eyes would be wriggling above where your mother’s hand darted until she squatted his head to the exact spot the onions lay. 

    Much like Chidiebere, the vendor forces your hand: you squat, pointing once more to the elusive bulbs, mirroring your brother’s antics.

    “Ah, that one is five hundred nairas,” he finally concedes.

    You reel back, as if his words physically push you. Five hundred what, for these diminutive onions? “Isn’t it two hundred naira?” you attempt to negotiate, only to be met with a toothy grin, tarnished by the hue of tobacco-stained teeth—a mirror of the woman at the funeral, her annoyance concealing her smile.

    Money slips through hands like water through a sieve, a realization you’ve witnessed before. At the  burial, you elbowed your way to the front of the line for refreshments, your urgency akin to others jostling for their share. Fingers brushed against food, others’ as well as yours, and the sensation of salvation mingled with the fervor. When your turn arrived, the distributor bypassed you for a scrawny boy clutching his portion as if it were a lifeline. The boy’s hungry eyes and lips devoured the rice, drenched in red oil, his feeble frame a testament to the cruel sting of scarcity.

    You waited but she kept testing your patience as she served others without acknowledging you anymore.  “Aunty I dey wait na,” you reminded. 

    She bared her teeth. “ No be people I dey serve? You too big for this thing oh.” You clenched your fist, your ego crushed. So you left the burial ceremony without informing your mother of your departure. Muttering how biased she was. 

    “If you no want buy, abeg leave my shop. Na money we dey find for this country,” the hausa man reminds you, swatting off flies. You shake your head, fishing out one thousand naira notes from your pocket and handle it to him. He grabs it and lifts it higher as if it’s a telescope, a fake note.

    “I hope to say this money no be canta?” he says and tosses it into his bag.

    “Oga, you go give me jara oh. Five hundred naira no be beans.” you jokingly say as he hauls one more into it and stretches the tied onions to you. You take your change and trudge off. You hope the money your mother gave you would sustain all the things she needs for her cooking. Life no balance sha, you think.

    *****

    Hours earlier, before your mother dispatched you to the market.

    You were returning from the football field, when a piercing scream reverberated from your home. Instinct urged you to intervene, but familiarity bred a kind of apathy towards the tumultuous symphony within your household. Your father’s once-commanding voice berated, “You must be mad, Chinelo!”

    Does a drunkard discern the boundary between reality and his intoxicated musings? “Why haven’t you cooked since four hours ago?”

    Approaching the window, you observed your father’s wrath descending upon your mother, her arms protecting her face from the storm of his blows. His arms, vessels of inebriated strength, struck her with an unholy fury. It was a scene familiar to you, as regular as the rhythm of your heartbeat.

    In the corner, your younger brother sobbed, a witness to the macabre theatre of domestic discord. Your father, Amaobi, wielded his anger like a weapon, unleashing its venom on the most inconsequential provocations. His words stumbled out, hindered by the stammer that had long held him captive.

    He glared menacingly at her as she whimpered on the floor and then, he stormed off to his room, the echo of his rage trailing in his wake. He had always been a tempest on the precipice of eruption, his ire triggered by trifles. You watched your mother pick herself up from the floor and shuffle to the kitchen, her limbs carrying her weight with an air of resignation. Your brother followed, tears painting his face. But why? You had asked no one in particular severally. Had they spent a happy time together? In a gladsome ecstasy? 

    Why was she musing all this beating alone, spending her days sobbing in a pathetic depression? You pondered the reasons behind the torment your mother silently endured. What brought them to this point? Were there once moments of joy, now buried beneath the weight of resentment? Why did she bear the brunt of his aggression, spending her days imprisoned in this cycle of melancholy?

    Hours later, after your father had departed to engage in his vices, your mother received a call that elicited an ear-piercing scream. The phone call was met with a response that seemed to exude elation, an emotion incongruent with the news she had received. Her body language exuded an almost giddy anticipation as she wiped tears from her eyes, as though she had been praying for this very moment. 

    “Ọ bụ gịnị? What it’s?”

    Your mother sprawled on the floor. “A hit-and-run car ran over your father. He’s dead. ” Her eyes beamed with sunlit happiness, momentary giggling gliding off her lips as she dusted her dress and went inside. You realized in those eyes of hers shone a hunger for normality, for regalement, for comfort and succour. Her body longed for freedom from this den called marriage.

    Unbeknownst to you, her hunger for freedom must not be limited to emotional emancipation alone. Aside from that, there was hunger for survival.

  • Two Poems by Emmanuel Yamba

    Greatness is a Survival Story

    When you were born, your body was offered to God –
    the priest held you in the air before the congregation,
    before the altar, and there, surrender your life. The man
    of God said, he saw greatness in your eyes and your
    mother grew a butterfly and named you Emmanuel. As your
    days became to stretched, your mother didn’t know she couldn’t
    live to see her crying baby walk with smiles planted on
    his face out of secondary school. Or that of his father that
    was going to be missing for a time long like forever. She would
    feel sorry to also know that her father’s daughter would grow tire
    of calling you son and misnamed you, yet you kept your body. The
    priest didn’t do well, he should’ve told her greatness is a survival story.

    Glossary of Things We Inherited 

    TermsOperational definition 
    abomination this time a man gun did not mistake a man for an animal but, another man offered his daughter to a rich man for a reasonable price, learning slavery from his ancestors.
    brokennessthe streets bring back memory of the war – violence, you packed in a corner of the road to see how a boy hauled scissor out of his side to carve the body of another boy into wounds.
    catastropheyou know God’s angry when he steals the sun and send heavy rainfall. once it turned our home to pool & everything floated like the way a brother lost in the sea, was brought to the shore after two days.
    darknessafter the civil war, we were found without form & void, darkness grew over the face of this city and we spoke light, till this day, our voices are still struggling for existence.
    elegyis another name given to a country who still knows nothing other than keeping homes of lifelessness in its body like a cemetery. today, i peel this country off my lip and replace it with nothing but watch if our wounds will heal out of time.
    frustrationyour phone waited for you to make your bed and walked out of the table, tore the window screen and found the street. never to return.
    griefwhen God gets tire with silence, he answers with grief. he inject it into the veins of our country till a boy couldn’t find his father after the war, a girl raped at 14 became mother & your mother jagged language still translate the anger in widowhood
    hopenot everything falling beneath the ground is buried, some are seeds planted to grow into trees. hope is a metaphor for living in a broken country.

    Bio

    Emmanuel G G Yamba writes from Monrovia, Liberia. He’s a graduate of the University of Liberia and SprinNG Advancement Fellowship. His work has been featured and forthcoming in The Shallow Tales Review, The MUSE, SprinNG, Inkspired, Funminiyi Anthologies, Libretto Magazine, Salamander Ink, African Writer, Kalahari Review, Odd Mag., Rigorous, TVO Tribe, Ibadan Arts, An anthology for Abunic and elsewhere. He’s on IG as yamba86163

  • The Night Turns to Day – Anita Okoeko

    In trembling and fear, 
    My sober soul like a sheep,
    Through the dark, nothing in sight can spare,
    My thoughts like a cargo is shipped, 
    The obstacles on the way ever ready to clear,
    Again my thoughts shipped, wheeled and spilled,
    Down through the depth of my spirit,
    That awaits underneath aspiens, 
    Every sound of the dark in this forest,
    Does nothing but reads a meaning to.
    In sleep, I feel the cruelty that abounds in the jungle,
    I awake to the reality of how hard hard it is to juggle,
    Juggle through the ups and downs in the forest, 
    But in a weak spirit thinks the end would fumble.

    Yes, my sober soul,
    The obstacles on the way, longed to clear.
    But what is of a soul that aspires so much if the spirit is weak?
    What is of a soul that expects much if the dark ceases to flee?
    I’ve had expectations in life that should fetch me happiness,
    But bitterness each day, the tongue of my soul tastes,
    I have thrived by all means to see what becomes of the strength,
    Might and power the dark holds in the end,
    But I’m made a fish of myself by it’s arrogance.
    A fish without fins to swim, 
    Meant to drown in the rivers of suffering, pain and shame!
    No longer can my spirit take this, for weakness and defeat it has accepted.

    My soul rises in search of the golden waters even in the dark,
    And finally, the hope of a new dawn is here.
    The scourges and tastes of bitterness is quenched,
    Quenched by the sweet and delicious taste of strength, 
    Reaffirmation, consciousness and prowess,
    My soul is determined to see what becomes of the dark,
    Patience and endurance patting it on the shoulders, 
    Nodding their heads in affirmation,
    Affirmation and confirmation that the game would soon be mine.
    Like wheels clogged, slowly, the dark begins to fade,
    The awful and wearisome sounds often made, 
    Begin to sail away,
    And then the sounds that bring hope, 
    A bright future, the evidences
    Of what my expectations in life should be, 
    All of these I see in limelight,
    My weak spirit in a bid to survive has awoken,
    Awoken and seen the result that the end of the dark has brought,
    True to my expectations,
    The Night has been turned to Day!

  • He Still Believes – Mike Chin

    “Don’t take too long washing these dishes,” Gary said. “Santa’s coming soon.”

    He gave his mother a squeeze from behind at the sink and kissed Sierra’s neck. He rubbed his hand over her stomach, too, before heading back to the living room to watch It’s a Wonderful Life—the scene where George Bailey’s little brother was so reckless stacking the good flatware for a party while George and his father discussed finances and dreams deferred.

    Gary’s mother rinsed the soap from one of the big knives Sierra could rarely bring herself to use–sharp and murderous as it was. A “grownup” knife. The older woman wielded it with such ease when she diced mangoes for a fruit salad that afternoon, when she cleaned it now, and handed over with a flick of the wrist for Sierra to dry it. Sierra’s face looked back at her from the clean face of the blade. The bright glare of the fluorescent light overhead obscured the reflection. Sierra never turned on herself because it hurt her head.

    Sierra couldn’t have imagined this whole scenario even a year earlier. She’d gotten laid off from her job in financial aid for an educational non-profit that couldn’t afford to offer financial aid anymore. She hadn’t imagined unemployment would give way to online dating, or that she’d get pregnant, or that all of this might lead to a stay-at-home mom future.  

    It had been a major victory to convince Gary not to travel home this Christmas, when Sierra made it clear she wasn’t comfortable flying pregnant, even if the doctors said it was perfectly safe at this stage. The pregnancy—this whole life with Gary—was unplanned, unimaginable really, a year earlier, when he was one of a half-dozen coffee meetups she’d agreed to from a dating app. The idea of staying at Gary’s mom’s house pregnant was simply too much to bear that Christmas.

    It had been a minor setback then when Gary announced that his mother was coming to stay with them. Sierra had wanted Christmas to enable her to catch her breath, but she recognized she was asking a lot of Gary to spend his first-ever Christmas away from his childhood home.

    Gary’s mom insisted Sierra called her Meg, which felt like a sweet albeit unearned intimacy. Meg was stout, gray-haired, a body all too anxious for grandmotherhood. Sierra intuited that she put aside her misgivings about how quickly Gary had intertwined her life with hers for the excitement of welcoming a baby.

    Meg spoke in a low voice as the Charleston contestant in the movie. “There’s something we need to discuss.”

    Sierra dried the big glass bowl Gary had brought into the relationship but Meg had never seen him use. She was nervous about heavy glass things, too, the risk-reward ratio of them being pretty on the table but threatening to shatter if she dropped them, not least of all when its surface was slick with water.

    “Gary’s father and I waited too long to tell him about Santa Claus.”

    Sierra laughed softly, breathing easier. She could handle warm nostalgia. Welcomed even stories from Gary’s youth, how he’d come to be as sweet and innocent as he was—the kind of person who paid cash around the holidays so he’d always have change to give Salvation Army Santas outside stores, and who always slowed down or moved over to let people enter a highway with ease.

    “Then his father passed,” Meg scrubbed a cookie sheet with a Brillo pad, loosening the burnt remains from the snickerdoodles Sierra had left in the oven too long. “Gary was twelve. I couldn’t bear to break it to him then.” 

    Sierra tried to offer some reassurance about how parents did the best they could. She didn’t think of herself as that well-equipped for motherhood. Gary would be a good father.

    Meg cut her off, “What I’m trying to tell you is, we never told him about Santa.”

    Sierra tried to suss out where Meg was going. Had it been some sort of ordeal when he did figure it out, or when the wrong person told him. An embarrassingly public revelation? 

    “Listen to me.” Meg’s voice grew perceptibly sharper. “I’m trying to tell you, he doesn’t know. He still believes.”

    Gary had made mention of Santa a lot that holiday season. Sierra wasn’t pregnant enough yet for the baby to kick, but had grown large enough to sort of roil beneath the surface of her belly. Gary had warned this half-formed thing not to be naughty, because Santa was watching. He’d made a similar warning to boys roughhousing outside a Denny’s where they’d stopped for breakfast the week before, when Sierra craved bacon and eggs. She’d thought it all charming and imagined him gleefully donning a Santa suit in years to come, theatrically staging the delivery of presents on Christmas Eve, taking bites from cookies.

    Sierra remembered how carefully Gary had selected three of the Christmas cookies to put on a little plate for Santa after dinner. Three of the best cookies, left on the mantle.

    “I’m getting too old to keep it all up alone,” Meg said. “Especially if you aren’t going to come back to my house for Christmas. I’ve had help the last few years. It’s my neighbor Luca who’d get up on the roof.”

    Sierra remembered Luca, actually. They’d stayed two nights in Gary’s childhood home over the summer, when it felt too early to be spending the night at her boyfriend’s mother’s house, but she could tell Gary was committed to his mother, and that felt endearing, too. Luca was the nextdoor neighbor, who mowed his lawn bare chested, all his hairy paunch exposed to the world.

    “You have your own life. I understand,” Meg said. “But after you mess up telling your son about Santa for this long, it’s just cruel to do it when he’s a grown man.  I’m telling you for his sake. You’ve got to keep it up.”

    Sierra came to understand that Meg surveying the lawn and the roof, tracking exit points, and lingering to press her weight against the creakiest floorboards were not matters of scrutinizing the house, but rather recognition. She insisted Sierra complain of an upset stomach before bedtime to later have an excuse to go to bed early. When Sierra didn’t say it—or didn’t say it soon enough, Meg stepped in too loudly and all but theatrically offered her an antacid, “to help settle your tummy, sweetheart. You were complaining about how sick you felt.”

    Sierra did excuse herself from bed and found Meg outside, she had a pair of ski poles outstretched, each with plastic animal hoof affixed to the ends, expertly laying reindeer tracks in the snow. Meg had already leaned a ladder against the side of the house—a ladder Sierra couldn’t fathom where she’d found or stowed—and prodded Sierra to climb it to shake jingle bells on the roof. And, after all of this, Meg wheeled out the big suitcase she’d insisted no one could help her take upstairs, and removed all of the gifts, wrapped in red and gold foil. “Always foil. Santa never uses wrapping paper with a print on it.” Two presents for Gary, one for Sierra, one for herself. Last, Meg took a bite from one of the Christmas cookies on the plate. Sierra ate a whole one of hers. “You can mix it up,” Meg said. “Make it your own. But the reindeer prints are a must if there’s snow. And the jingle bells. And the foil.”

    The next morning Gary ripped through the foil wrapping with glee to get to a video game and a book about parenting. He looked to Meg, it must have been an instinct. “How did Santa know?”

    “He always knows, doesn’t he?” Meg said, not only smug but triumphant, as if her son’s joy was directly proportional to how right she was to keep Santa Claus magic alive in his life.

    Sierra sipped a cup of store-bought eggnog, warmed in the microwave. She missed coffee, but despite Meg’s insistence one cup wouldn’t hurt the baby, Sierra knew herself. One cup wouldn’t have been enough, just a tease, enough to make her miss the second cup that much worse.

    “Go on, sweetheart.” Meg had turned her attention to Sierra. Meg drank a mix of equal parts coffee and instant hot chocolate, a little eggnog as a substitute for half and half, because they didn’t have any in the house. Gary drank his coffee black with a spoonful of sugar. “Go on and open your presents.”

    It had been madness—the lengths this woman went to, and, no less so, Gary’s bright-eyed reaction the next morning when he asked if they’d heard the bells on the roof and when he pointed at the paw prints out back. It was all enough to make Sierra question—really question—if she could build a life with him.

    The key was boundaries, she’d decided in the end. They’d never go to Meg’s for Christmas, and she’d do her best to discourage Meg from visiting the house that next December. A six-month-old provided a good excuse because Sierra and Gary were both a little sleep-deprived and he tended to defer to her judgment about not wanting people in their mess of a house and accepted her trepidations about visitors who might bring a cold in that could jeopardize little Ben’s fragile constitution.

    Six months old at Christmastime, and Ben had started sleeping longer, most of all when his father held him. Sierra had been hesitant about co-sleeping. She’d read about how it could foster over-dependence, over-attachment, the sort of thing where a kid would have trouble detaching when the time came for daycare and school or for them to get a date night to themselves. 

    But it was hard to argue with results, after Gary had transitioned to working from home for his database management gig, she appreciated that he could take Ben off her hands for nap times—usually taking a nap himself—while Sierra had the chance to go for a run or watch an episode of Real Housewives. It was hardest of all to argue the point when she watched the two of them rest so peacefully. 

    Christmas Eve. It’s A Wonderful Life on TV again, Mary telling George he’d lassoed a stork, Gary’s face colored in flickering black and white, Ben’s eyes closed, mouth open and drooling on Gary’s chest, nestled in his flannel shirt. Gary’s eyes closed, too, hard to tell if he were asleep or merely resting his eyes. She might gently wake him for the end of the movie—his favorite part, when George Bailey went running through the streets, calling every old building wonderful. Or she might let him doze. Better not to risk waking Ben if Gary startled at her touch. It was good for both of her boys to be at peace. Besides, having his own child to rest against his body seemed to console Gary about not being with his own mother this Christmas. 

    Sierra was blessed, she knew, to have had a child with such a good father.

    She saw the moonlit outline of antlers through the window that looked out on the backyard

    Then, she heard the crunch of snow underfoot outside.

    Sierra found Meg out there, the same ski poles with reindeer hoof prints on the ends of them. She wore a bicycle helmet with wide plastic antlers affixed to each side.

    There was a delicate balance, living with a baby. Sierra had learned to loathe delivery people who insisted on ringing doorbells when they left packages. She’d learned to leave her phone with not only the ringer off, but in Do Not Disturb mode because the vibration itself could wake baby Ben. There was always the chance of a baby sleeping and these were the most precious hours of the day to get dishes done, to fold a load of laundry, to get a moment to read or to sit still and think.

    So, it was instinctive, even in these absurd circumstances, for Sierra to gently close the sliding door behind her, tiptoe through the snow, and tap her on the shoulder.

    Meg startled, leaping from the touch, staggering, only catching herself with her ski poles. She exhaled, her breath taking shape in a jagged cloud of mist. “Are you crazy?” She shook her head. “Imagine sneaking up on me like that!”

    Sierra pressed a finger to her lips and rallied all of her self-control. “We didn’t invite you for Christmas.”

    “I’m well aware of that.” Meg rubbed a reindeer hoof against the errant prints she’d left when she caught herself. “Don’t worry yourself. I’ve got a room at the bed and breakfast at the riverfront.”

    Sierra almost felt sorry at the mention of the place. There weren’t a lot of hotel options nearby. The bed and breakfast used to be nice, but dwindling clientele and changes in management left it a hole in the wall, in need of renovations that would never come. Sierra’s brother had stayed there when he came to see the baby but didn’t want to be intrusive with an infant around—he had kids of his own. He reported back that the breakfast had amounted to a Keurig and frozen blueberry muffins guests had to microwave themselves in the lobby.

    This wasn’t a time to feel bad for Meg, though. “What are you doing here?” Sierra asked.

    Meg planted the ski poles in the snow and put her hands on her hips. “My intuition told me you weren’t going to keep up traditions.”

    Sierra had paid more attention when Gary spoke about Santa Claus this year, mostly to Ben about being good and stories about how this was Santa’s busy time of year and speculating about if the elves used SQL server to keep track of all of the good boys and girls. He offered nuggets to Sierra, too, though, speculating about what Santa might bring Ben. He appeared nonplussed when she talked about the gifts she’d bought they’d say were from Santa versus ones credited to Mom and Dad. (At six months, the distinction felt absurd, but she knew she was supposed to be invested in such things).

    “It’s not your place to our family traditions.” Sierra knew it bothered Meg they hadn’t married.

    “Every boy should have Santa Claus in his life,” Meg said.

    “We can make-believe Santa fine on our own.”

    “And if you don’t make-believe the way Gary has the last thirty years, you think he won’t notice? You think it won’t ruin Christmas?”

    The woman could rationalize anything. Even Gary admitted that, a moment of frustration after he’d argued with her over phone weeks back, his final assertion that, no, she could not come for Christmas that year. Sierra felt relieved he could recognize some faults in his mother. 

    Meanwhile, there they stood at an impasse. Sierra’s toes numbed in her fuzzy slippers, not built for the outdoors.

    “You know, if Ben wakes up, Gary’s going to wake up, too.” Sierra whispered. “The first thing he’ll do is go looking for me. What’ll he think when he finds you like this?”

    Meg grumbled that she’d done enough anyway and took off the antlers and the only condition she imposed was that Sierra had to help her get the gifts in the house. Sierra knew she should say no, but acquiesced because she couldn’t help feeling she’d lose whatever moral high ground she had if she denied a mother the chance to give her son a Christmas present, or denied a grandmother from gifting something to her only grandson his first December.

    There were a lot of presents. Meg had rented an SUV from the airport for the space to haul all the foil-covered packages she must have wrapped at the hotel for them to be in such pristine condition across a plane ride. Meg didn’t come into the house, but the two of them carried it all to the front door, where Sierra hid the boxes in the coat closet in case Gary woke while she was in the process of putting them under the tree. 

    “One last thing,” Meg said when they were done, a film of sweat over her face, a cruel grin. “Put out your hands.”

    Sierra did and Meg fetched a little red pouch from her coat pocket. Meg was back in the SUV already by the time Sierra pulled the little gold drawstring open wide enough to understand she’d been gifted a lump of coal.

    #

    The next morning, Gary’s face glowed, looking first to Sierra, then to Ben. “Can you believe Santa brought all this?”

    He got a complex model airplane with a lot of small pieces. Sierra would have to police him, keeping them away from Ben. Ben wasn’t very interested in putting things in his mouth just yet, but if he’d proven anything in those first six months, it was how quickly he might change. Gary got a mystery novel, too, and rifled through it, as if to confirm, in childlike wonder, there were words on every page.

    “I should FaceTime Mom while Ben opens his gifts,” Gary said. “You don’t mind, do you?”

    #

    Years went by. One son turned to two. Gary insisted on Meg staying for the holiday, and Sierra couldn’t deny him that. She imagined the Santa issue would come to a head one year or another, but when it only came up once a year and their children to keep up appearances for, Sierra let it slip.

    Then her boys—ten and twelve—still believed. Sierra began to understand what Meg had said about it being cruel, after a certain point to shatter a life-long illusion.

    The Christmas Eve after Meg had passed, Sierra opened the ski bag Meg’s sister had surreptitiously gifted her when they were clearing out Gary’s childhood home that fall. 

    Sierra found the jingle bell anklets and bracelets, for ease of ringing while climbing a ladder up to the roof. She found the collapsible antlers, the rolls of foil wrapping paper. The Ski poles with hoofs at their ends. She thought to wonder, for the first time, if Meg ever used them for skiing at all, or bought them exclusively for reindeer purposes, hoofs affixed from the day she’d brought them home to this very moment. The woman was nothing if not committed.

    After the boys had gone to bed and Gary fell asleep on the couch–the boys all dozed off on the couch, Sierra got to work.

    She took care of the presents first, all wrapped in foil—a gift certificate to a spa she’d bought herself, in the biggest box because the boys always thought it was riotously funny when Santa put small things in enormous boxes. Two presents—a nice sweater and a remote control with too many buttons for Gary. Then, two evenly distributed piles, ten presents each for the boys. As she put the last one down, she could’ve sworn she caught Pete’s eyes open, but he closed them quickly, and his breathing never changed.

    How many times must Gary have caught his mother in some act of positioning presents or taking a bite from a Gingerbread cookie? Or climbing up to a roof? He had to have known something, hadn’t he, after all this time?

    But boys wanted to believe.

    Maybe Sierra did, too.

    She closed the sliding glass door behind her as softly as she could, dropped the ski bag on the patio with only a small clatter, took out the ski poles, and set about making merry.

  • For Beulah – Psalmuel Benjamin

    Maybe it was symbolic that I had 
    Mourned you before you morphed 
    Out of your tender flesh. I slept in 
    Black clothes. You aborted my sleep
    With cries. I roamed around the room
    With clenched fist against pain but 
    ‘Twould be madness to punch the 
    Wind. Your mother had this darkness
    In her eyes. Her shoulder was heavy.
    Motherhood stretched her breasts 
    And Grandma’s back bore your body.
    I knew the demons were present but
    I didn’t know they came with the 
    Grim reaper. I’d have prayed in 
    tongues through the rugged night 
    And teased God to pretend that you
    Were another Hezekiah and Grandma’s
    Back was the wall you faced with 
    tears of supplication for another full
    Day to breathe and laugh and eat 
    Biscuits and tell Mommy again “My
    Mummy, I woke up” 
    I hope you remember that I poured
    Prayers into your forehead through 
    My palms, that night, before returning
    To bed. That’s our last contact before
    News got to me that you were on 
    Your way up, all ready. To and fro the 
    Medicine house, we missed the 
    Emergency flight of troubled mothers
    And back home, ’twas the debris of 
    Your being on grandpa’s bed. I once
    Cursed death for taking a random 
    Kid at Grandpa’s accident. Today, 
    Again, I curse death for breaking this
    Home like a robber and choosing 
    Your body as a window to burgle 
    Out joy. Sorrow is the simple song
    when  a soul rolls out and the body 
    Becomes a dead log. I believed that
    Dead bodies could be Adam-ed again
    Sustained with explanation that Gene
    Mutation and life expectancy would 
    Only mess you up for eternal beauty.
    Hear, my baby, your uncle is lame
    And he can’t defy this art of disappearance. 
    Your picture is the background of the
    Keyboard I wrote this poem with. 
    And like stale morcha, I can still 
    Smell the whif of your abandoned skin,
    Brush hair with bonds and white 
    Round neck you vomitted on — sparing
    The blue love design on the chest.
    We’re still preaching to your mom
    And fumbling for accurate words 
    To lessen the pain from the pinch 
    Of your death, I mean your departure,
    I mean your holiday, I mean your 
    Sweet stay in God’s safest palms
    Where mortality cannot reach.

    Psalmuel Benjamin is a writer and poet from Nigeria. He’s got poems and other writings published and forthcoming on digital magazines and prints. Facebook: psalmuel Benjamin oluwasheun, Insta: spokespsalmuel 

  • Venn Diagram – Abasi-maenyin Esebre

    It wasn’t there.

    When Victor Akan cut through the small passage just behind his rented apartment and greeted his neighbours in a bright tone underscored by a neutral face, he never imagined his broken-headlamp, paint-bleached, cracked-windscreen, always-breaking-down Audi 80 would be gone-gone.

    The only thing left of the car was a wet tyre trail and the steering wheel, which he picked and turned left and right as though navigating through the smoky, blue morning haze.

    Victor stood still for the longest as if the events leading up to the car’s disappearance would reveal themselves in an astral projection like in some futuristic crime thriller. He picked an oddly smooth gravel in the centre of a triple Venn diagram. After studying its surface, Victor tossed it into his pocket and lumbered to his rented apartment.

    He didn’t wince after stepping on a nail and impaling his toe. Victor felt the pain as a mere itch, an echo of pain. Shoulders slouched, he prodded back home, keeping the news to himself.

    Blessing, his neighbour, threw hot water from filtered parboiled rice on the ground just as Victor rounded the bend. The scalding-hot liquid splashed on Victor—who didn’t flinch—and rinsed off the blood trickling from his shanked, bleeding toe. The bowl dropped from Blessing’s hand and clattered to the ground. She raised her hands to her mouth, unable to settle between shock or an apology, to comment on the hot water soaking through Victor’s clothes or the nail poking through his toe.

    Eno caught a glimpse of her husband’s gravel-shaped head through the half-parted curtains still draped over her closed fist.

    The baby had finally dozed off after rationing insomnia to everyone the previous night, forcing her parents to writhe awake like logs turning into vipers.

    Eno dashed outside to urge Victor to open the gate quietly, but he jangled the iron, clanged the bolts, and swung the gate back on the frame with enough force to tear it off its hinges.

    The baby’s peal broke the calm and the haze afforded by the morning fog. Eno raised her eyes to the ceiling and threw her poisoned gaze at her stupid, useless husband.

    Victor slammed the steering wheel against the butterfly sewing machine that sat in the right corner. He stomped to the bathroom cursing heaven and hell, his parents, the government, his wife, but not his precious, little daughter.

    —

    The previous day, after having spent ten thousand naira—all the money he’d made that morning from driving—to retrieve his impounded vehicle, Victor came home to an extra pair of oddly familiar shoes on his often-decluttered veranda.

    Under normal circumstances, he wouldn’t have returned home so early. Hard worker that he was, he would’ve stayed patrolling the streets of Calabar till late in the evening when he would come home with suya or Agege bread for his doting, beautiful wife who was at home all day taking care of their child, whom a neighbour once called an eyesore.

    All the doors of all the other houses in the compound were shut. The initial bustle of the early morning had dwindled, and now, everyone had dispersed to where money dragged their aching muscles and parched throats as the midday sun split the wispy clouds to reveal a lapis lazuli sky.

    The thump of a struck ball resounded through the slanted louvres from Victor’s house. He walked up to the door and found it slightly ajar. Pushing it open, he furrowed his brow at a football match blaring on the TV, its volume at the highest.

    The commentator’s smoky voice filled the parlour like incense.

    Victor picked the remote and pushed a button down, sucking out the depth from the commentator’s voice until a silent whimper crept into the parlour. He listened for a while before tentatively raising the TV’s volume. Victor parted his lips to voice his wife’s name, but he tiptoed towards the bedroom and peeped through the slightly billowing floral print curtain.

    His heart sank to the floor. The view from the slanted curtain knocked out the air from his lungs. Throwing the curtains back, Victor leapt from his slightly crouched position and grabbed Gideon, the plumber who sold toilet seats and pipes just out front, by his slacked trousers.

    Gideon unmounted Eno and attempted to fumble his belt into the buckle, but Victor drove his shoulder into Gideon’s stomach and took him down. They shuffled in the tight space, bumping their heads against the bed’s legs, and grunting as they squeezed their palms around each other’s necks.

    Gideon punched Victor in the face; Victor scratched the bastard’s eye. Gideon managed to writhe out of Victor’s death grasp and rattled across several lanes while Victor gave chase.

    A few minutes later, Victor slunk into the living room, heaving and puffing. His chest and shoulders expanded and compressed like an accordion played by an amateur.

    He stomped to the bedroom.

    “In our house! In front of our daughter! Chai!”

    “My love, forgive me.”

    “Eh eh, better call me Victor. Who’s your love? Who’s your love?” His voice broke.

    “Who is your love?” He fought the tears brimming in his eyes.

    Silence bridged the intervals between their heavy breaths.

    Eno slowly folded her wrapper over her chest.

    Victor slumped into the sofa and gazed at the TV, but his eyes were focused inwards on imaginings he couldn’t project. His pulse leapt and dipped as if plotted by an electrocardiograph going haywire.

    He sat still while Eno quivered in the corner next to him. She knelt to beg.

    He looked into her eyes and knelt next to her.

    Holding her hands in his, he asked, “How could you?” in a voice so tender, a voice so levelled you could feel the summit it was trying not to reach.

    The woman was too stunned to speak. She scrambled her words and tried an incorrigible lie, but Victor, undeterred by her ramble, cut through the charade.

    “How many times? I just dey waka dey suffer for wetin?”

    The commentator on TV parroted on, filling the silence that followed.

    “How many times? How long, ehn, how long has it been going on? So, I’m just there, sweating under the sun to bring money for another man to be sweating on top of my wife? Chai!”

    Victor let go of her hand.

    “How long!?”

    “This is the first time, I promise. My love, it has never happened before.”

    “Liar! How long? So, I’m just there driving up and down, here and there, collecting insults, and you’re here doing all this. Everyday. Is this why you always call me to ask when I’m coming back?”

    “No. It was a mistake. It was a mistake,” her voice cracked. Tears sluiced down her burning cheeks. 

    Victor looked past his wife to the girl in the cradle. A wicked thought cut across his mind. His heart leapt in his chest and lost its rhythm. He’d heard stories of men whose children weren’t theirs, how some of them had died from heart attacks, how families dissolved into strangers held together by a broken illusion of unison, of a Venn diagram split into random circles with no single overlap.

    He tried to declutter his mind but couldn’t shake the ugly thought out of focus.

    “How am I even sure that is my daughter?” He gestured at Idong wriggling in her cot.

    “What kind of nonsense question is that?”

    Eno’s agitation emboldened Victor.

    “Ehne, nau. How am I sure?”

    “Say anything, but that. Don’t say that, don’t say that at all. This is the first time I—”

    “I don’t want to hear it. Don’t even. In fact, tomorrow we’re going to the hospital. We’ll do a DNA test.”

    Eno broke into a callous laughter.

    “Yes o! Let us go. Let us go. We can even go now if you want.”

    Victor could see the fire in her eyes. He wanted to believe her, but to do so he had to call her bluff.

    “Tomorrow, we’re going!”

    “No problem.”

    “And I swear to God, if I find out that you’re lying, tomorrow-tomorrow, you’re going back to your father’s house.”

    Victor couldn’t believe what he’d just uttered. To shake off any lingering doubt about the decision, he stood up, scooped the car keys, and drove out.

    The cool air dried off the sweat from his temple. Elbow leaned against the car’s door and stroking his chin, Victor ran the events over and over in his mind, to both convince himself of its reality and to dilute the pain, just like how repeating a song too many times invites an inescapable nausea.

    While dropping off a passenger at the Marian walkover, task force members, greasy men with afternoon sweat caked into their cassava-starched shirts, swarmed his vehicle. They smelled like the losing team after a football match; their foul breath could kill a fly or light a cigarette.

    One of them, wearing a striped shirt, fished for the key in the ignition, his other hand grappling with the steering.

    The frustration of having just caught his neighbour in bed with his wife, of having spent ten thousand naira to have his car released earlier in the morning, and now, these greasy men trying to swindle him of his hard-earned money brought Victor to the end of a rope.

     Victor let go of the steering. He popped his seatbelt and grabbed the task force man by the neck and squeezed like he was wringing wet linen, like utong unen. The other task force members yelled and cursed in Efik; they left the car and sprung on Victor.

    “Kpong enye, or aya mkpa mfin, mmbo fi, kpong enye, Victor kpong.” Leave him alone, or you’ll die today.

    They jerked Victor’s firm arm, which refused to budge. Others punched Victor’s head now ribbed with veins, but he didn’t budge until a higher-up in the Task Force came and quelled the altercation by whispering in Efik and taking Victor under his shoulder to the foot of the walkover.

    —

    Now, today, when they were supposed to go for the DNA test, his car was stolen.

    He sat on a low stool and stared at his wife. Clenching his right fist, he counted his knuckles with his other palm. If he could yank out his eye and hurl it at her like a golf ball, he would. He sufficed to rest his chin on his interlocked fingers as a thought began to form in his head.

    Maybe this was a sign, God’s way of telling him to run. What if tomorrow, early in the morning, before the sun yawns over the horizon, he eloped with the ₦5,000 in the drawer and never returned? He could run to a new city where he could drape a new name over himself, learn a new language, get a different job, and never look back.

    He’d probably fund himself through a degree in civil engineering and settle down with a new family. If his daughter wasn’t his daughter, then that’d mean his ‘wife’ wasn’t his wife. It was either that or commit suicide or murder—he could barely suppress the rage coursing through his veins and his mind attacking itself. 

    How could he have been so blindsided? Now, his car is gone! How much bad news before a heart finally breaks? Why was life singling him out for all this trauma?

    He would’ve just sent her out if he wasn’t a man easily crippled by shame. Even when Blessing asked why he’d been chasing Gideon earlier in the day, he mumbled something unintelligible and walked past her. He liked to keep things contained: wine in a bottle, broomsticks in a bundle, a neck in a squeeze. If he was a sculptor, he would be able to carve the entire Marian market on a mustard seed.

    He drooped his head, stood up, and splashed cold water on his itchy face.

    “Dah!” he yelled, waking the baby Eno had managed to lull back to sleep again.

    She yelled at him to keep it down, and he screamed back that the car had been stolen. She heaved and dropped her hands to her side. Slowly, the baby fell asleep again.

    Victor, too busy making inquiries about the stolen vehicle and the whereabouts of Gideon, couldn’t find the time to head to the hospital. He hadn’t spoken to Eno all day. When he returned, he didn’t eat the eba and banga soup she placed on the table for him. That night, mother and daughter snuggled in bed, while Victor slept on the sofa in the parlour.

    While shrivelled in the parlour, the size of a baby’s clenched fist, a loud bang roused Victor from sleep. The second bang led a heavy boot through his front door that tore it off its hinges.

    Three men in balaclavas trooped into the yawning house.

    One lowered his gun at Victor while the other two went into the room and dragged Idong and Eno into the parlour. One held a knife to the child’s throat, another held a machete to Eno’s neck, and Victor stared down the nozzle of the gun pointed at him by the last robber.

    Victor’s arms fell to his side like steamed kelp; the weight of a dozen misfortunes in rapid succession tipped his hemispheres. Feeling every little pain chip back his already receding hairline, he chuckled—a deep, hollow laugh that stunned everybody, including his infant daughter.

    Victor guided the robber’s gun down to his chest and dared the towering man to pull the trigger. Death would carve a much-needed exit in his wounding life which is as empty as an anemone’s shell. The vein on Victor’s forehead bulged like a straw. He grew spirited and gestured and barked and sent spittle flying in all directions.

    Standing behind him, Eno begged and wailed, her face a web of snot and tears. She threw her hands back as Victor tackled the robber. They grunted as they tussled on the carpet.

    Pow!

    A shot rang out.

    A blackhole of silence sucked every decibel of sound from the room.

    Victor felt the vibration of the gun going off right in front of him and the torque of a bullet tearing through his tissues. He reached for the hole in his chest, but he felt nothing—no pain, no spiralling ache. Alerted by a cough behind him, he looked back to find his wife draped on the floor, blood dripping from her forehead like a bruised turnip.

    The robber who had fired the gun stared at them with his eyes wide open before he rushed to Eno and shook her, pushing Victor aside. Victor leapt on the man and clawed his face, pulling the mask off to reveal a familiar face.

    The robbers booted Victor in the face and pulled their exposed leader—who tugged the mask back over his face—out from under him. They shuffled out of the house like ninjas.

    If Victor’s reflection could form in his wife’s clotting blood, it’d have shown his face snagged and crinkled like a funeral kerchief.

    He yelled for the neighbours as he sat on the floor shaking his numb wife. Victor pressed his forehead to Eno’s. His tears fell into the tears in her eyes and trickled towards her ear.

    —

    All through the morning, as he sat in his bathroom rolling his wife’s ring, which he’d now passed a string through, Victor cried. Life didn’t have to be this hard.

    How did the bullet pass through him? What sorcery could explain this madness? Isn’t the comfort of a difficult life the option of suicide when one’s self-help philosophy no longer suffices as a driving force? Wasn’t that the consolation prize for those cheated out of intelligence, beauty, wit, opulence, tax evasion and generational wealth?

    By morning, the hole in Victor’s chest had knitted scar tissue over itself. When he narrated the story to the crowd who surrounded the apartment, they thought him a witch who had used his wife for rituals. Blessing tried to explain the hot water and nail scenario to them, but a mob has no ears.

    It didn’t help that when they moved Eno, her blood had trickled into a rectangle that housed three intersecting circles. The bloody Venn diagram drew an impassioned uproar from the crowd.

    A ragged teen with a chipped tooth rolled two greasy tyres towards Victor, who’d already been doused with black-market fuel by a man in caftan. The mob broke into a deafening chant.

    A man in a wife-beater set a petrol-wet rug ablaze and smashed the glass on the pavement where Victor lay.

    The fire spread all over him.

    In no time, Victor was a licked kerosene mango as flames curled from his body in all directions. The sweltering mob parted for him as he broke into a frantic run terminated by a lurking man who struck the back of Victor’s head with a long piece of wood.

    Victor teetered into the gutter and sloshed through the spirogyra-polluted water before the dizziness forced his eyes shut. His head hit the water and never came back up. Fragmented words swarmed in his head, echoes of curses not sharp enough to break through the dense, black water. From fire to water; he went from burning to drowning.

    The image of his wife and daughter flickered in his fogged mind.

    The mob took hours to disperse. Unlike in some cases where a police van would screech onto the scene and interrupt the ruckus, no such thing happened. The mob was victorious, even though most people involved in the carnage had no clue why they were remitting violence or the crime of its recipient, justice was served. Jungle justice.

    Still stuck in the gutter, Victor’s lungs held more water than oxygen.

    Hours later, Victor’s brother, Micheal, and Eno’s sisters, Faith and Marigold, came to the house and took Idong from the landlord, who had kept the baby safe from the carnage.

    When night fell, Gideon and a couple of street boys huddled in a rickety pickup truck and drove to the junction to retrieve Victor’s body from the gutter. They groped the greasy, murky water with a long bamboo only to turn over charred flesh glued to worsted wool. They searched the entire length of the gutter.

    He wasn’t there.

    Once the mob dispersed and the corn sellers set up their rusted grills and coal, Victor swam through the spirogyra-coated water without once coming up for air. As evening dawned and moonlight filtered through the clouds, Victor roused to his feet, having reached where the thin gravel-studded gutter broke into a wider one. He crawled into an empty street at Parliamentary Extension where he spotted an abandoned building into which he stumbled.

    Each treacherous step he took forward set off an odd rattling sound in the sealed hole in his chest where the bullet had passed through.

    What could be making that sound? The bullet? No, it had passed through him. How had his body not collapsed into the hole in his chest? His charred flesh shed itself as he picked at it, turning from hot pink to brown, while the flesh on his tummy peeled back to reveal keloids that slowly caked back into unblemished skin.

    How could Eno die just the day before he wanted to run, the day they were supposed to do a DNA test, even though he couldn’t actually afford one? How had the bullet blasted through his back? So, Gideon was behind this? Was he also the one who stole his car? Why wasn’t the mob able to kill him? Who sparked the first rumour? Where was his wife’s body? Questions cloned themselves in his head and branched into a myriad of subquestions. One could imagine his synapses clogged by question marks wriggling like crochet hooks tangling his dendrites.

    Victor looked to the corner of the house where a coir rope looped over itself like a brown tree snake. He dragged himself there and tested the weight of the rope with a small toss. He whistled as he hurled the free end of the rope over a fan’s hook and secured it with a double knot. Victor levelled a block under the fan, stood on it, and looped the free end of a rope into a lasso.

    He fished out his wife’s ring, which had somehow managed to sink into his chest and kissed the cold metal. He rubbed his palms together and fastened the rope around his neck. He confirmed the knot with a slight tug and kicked away the cinderblock. 

    The rope constricted his oesophagus and dented his jugular. He struggled for air and flailed his legs as his face swelled like a puffer fish.

    Two hours passed, then three hours, then four. Instead of flies buzzing on his corpse, Victor woke up to find himself in a delirium, still suspended from the ceiling fan, with blood in his eye, a steering wheel in his hand, and a hood over his head.

    He was now somehow in his stolen Audi 80, suspended above the ground by the ceiling fan. On display in both side mirrors were memories of him and his wife in their happy days when their love was thicker than that seemingly impenetrable smoky blue morning’s haze, followed by a scene of him kissing a passenger a few months prior, while his wife stared from behind the windscreen, followed by a scene of Eno kneeling next to a river and crying and returning to a deadpan face on cue as directed by a high priestess dressed in red, followed by a scene where the priestess guided Eno to smash eggs and two olive oil bottles on a gravel in the centre of a Venn diagram, followed by a scene where Eno picked the gravel and walked away.

    In the rearview mirror, his wife’s wedding ring, the car’s steering wheel and the noose around his neck formed a Venn diagram that burst into flames. The rope snapped just as the image burned into his memory.

    He lay on the floor of the building, heaving and ugly-crying. He clasped one hand on his thumping chest and groped for the gravel, so he could throw it and try again. He swept his fingers on the floor and crawled all over.

    It wasn’t there.

    Abasi-maenyin Esebre is an Oron storyteller who centres Calabar in his writings. His essay Grief: Its Invisible Gerund was shortlisted for the continental non-fiction competition organised by Agbowo Magazine and won the 2023 SEVHAGE PRIZE for non-fiction. His essay Call Me By My Name has been published in AFREADA. He’s on Twitter @esebre20813 and Instagram @Abasimaenyin

  • Recollections II, Dawn, and Falling by Ayiyi Joel

    Recollections II

    For a friend. For Kafaya.

    Aging is quite cruel.
    & grief is a small room, a shoe, a set of milk teeth
    You never outgrow, it never falls off
    As memory never fails you
    As language does to a body empty of god,
    The way chattering and your high pitched voice left you.
    I don’t know how it works or why I’m fashioned that way,
    But I’ve come to realize that a wound reopened
    Stings me more— two shot in the same spot.
    & what breaks open a scar if not remembrance? 
    A new bleeding taking space & shape.
    It is Friday & I picture you still stuck beneath
    That bus, caught under that danfo till it became
    Unbearable for you. Till you could hold it no longer
    And let out the last whimper in the hospital
    Just adjacent the school that same Friday
    When you had gone out for the Jimoh prayer.
    No one saw all of this coming and no one knew you were leaving.
    Some of us saw all of it and some heard.
    We thought you’d return to us but, like the bird
    Noah sent the last time from the ark, you never did.
    It’s nine years now, after primary six, the adhan calling
    To prayer and I still find you bleeding. Salaam to all my dead.

    Dawn

    For Toheeb and others

    This time, we’d begin with laughter filling out mouth
    The way light floods a room when NEPA do not flop.
    I mean we’d be bright as the unravelling of leaves
    On a tree once bare of its glory.
    The day will go on as it should, no one
    Would drown in the pool of anxiety about what route
    The next meal would take to his table
    & night too would come calling as the beacon
    For a good rest— saviour of a weary body,
    Not a threshold into burning weeds and offering throats
    To the burns of liquor. Maybe the days
    Would be gentle on us like breeze on skin.
    & life will be something soft like the insides 
    Of white Agege bread on our tired palms.
    & our stories would take another turn towards dawn.

    Falling

    Burning out steadily, like a candle with a lit head
    The poem begins with my suffering. I should be 
    Happy. I think I should be. Not this broken.
    Not this sad with a glow, dimming.
    Addiction is to the body what fire is to wax.
    & I am searching for balance in the wrong places/things.
    Talking about what you love the most can also hurt you,
    The way a fish won’t believe what water could do
    It’s tender skin when heated to a boiling. 
    I mean, I am falling apart. 
    I am dying in the hands of what I love the most— love
    & addiction. I think I am soaring too far. The pills keep me high.
    The fall is imminent. I know this
    In the way mourning trails a loss
    You don’t know, love
    How much this laughter and smiles camouglages.
    One pill to silence the voices up there.
    To shut the demons out
    One shot to drown paranoia in waters.
    Two shot to unremember the ache.
    & half a bottle to not feel. To tuck them feelings away.

    Ayiyi Joel, TPC XVI is a young budding poet from Edo state in Nigeria.

  • Drowning Myself – Haliru Ali Musa

    This is my seventh day in the shower, attempting to wash away the sorrows of losing my lover.

    The hot water streams down, but it can’t cleanse the memories. It wasn’t always like this. I remember the first time I felt such profound loss. I had to grieve for my mother when I was just fifteen. I’m unsure if I remember how I managed to endure it, or if my memories have twisted themselves into something bearable over time.

    But it was a period marked by hardship, sadness, and a profound sense of loss—so intense that I believed I couldn’t survive without her. Yet, I reached twenty-five seemingly unscathed. Or so I thought.

    So, I knew the death of my lover would trigger a profound reaction in me, especially since I didn’t see it coming.  Everyone, I suppose, is destined to experience such devastation, at least, once in a lifetime. But, for me, it was more complicated; working at Kyauta Orphanage Home brought its own set of rules and boundaries: it’s against the rules for caregivers to fall in love with orphans under their care, and for a good reason. The power imbalance, for instance, makes it nearly impossible for orphans to freely consent to a romantic relationship thereby creating a fertile ground for potential exploitation.

    I don’t know what kind of message you’re supposed to decipher from my inability to justify my actions. Call it what you will, but I was in love. And my reasons were pure.

    Back then, when I resumed work at Kyauta Orphanage Home, falling in love was the last thing on my mind; my days were filled with diligent routines: checking on a few special orphans, helping them with meals, and simply sitting with them as they played.

    Nights, however, were different. I would go out and buy a bottle of cough syrup, a habit I had picked up during my university days. I never smoked or drank alcohol; the smell of both repelled me. Instead, I abused the dosage of the cough medicine. Most nights, I downed a full bottle, letting it lull me into drowsiness. By morning, I’d wake up feeling as fresh as a daisy.

    Naturally, a bond existed between me, a caregiver, and Jiddah, an orphan. This bond felt like the unseen roots of an ancient tree. It was not merely the comfort I could trace in her eyes, nor the warmth she said she felt when I was beside her. Rather, it was a sanctuary where both our souls drifted free—a kind of sanctuary likened to a “man and his bed’s”: An intimate space where vulnerabilities are laid bare and the essence of one’s being is unburdened  for a few hours each night.

    Eventually, when the man falls sick, the bed takes on a dual role; it becomes both a sanctuary and a prison–a place where the man is simultaneously cared for and constrained. The rhythms of his life slow, marked by the rise and fall of his fever, the restless shifting of his body, and the quiet moments of fitful sleep. 

    Such was what I felt when I fell in love with Jiddah, a deaf orphan I had cared for for over two years.

    Our bond began as something I couldn’t explain. At that time, it sounded wrong in my head when I tried to articulate it. Perhaps I never felt the need to articulate it until now…

    I remember her laughter: defined by her shoulders moving up and down, her smiles, her lips slightly parted, her eyes slightly squinted; and the way she would touch her chin with two fingers to indicate “Thank you.” Those moments made everything else fade away…

    And when she taught braille to younger blind kids, her fingers would trace the dots with rhythmic precision while her eyes were shut. In those moments, as she immersed herself in the world of braille, everything else in my mind seemed to fade. To truly appreciate the world of braille, one must witness it firsthand, and Jiddah was a master at it.

    But alongside those moments are memories of her that I tried to forget. One she passed to me in the most inconspicuous way: the secret of her violation by the house manager and her dream of leaving the orphanage someday to become a tailor.

    Perhaps, I tried to forget these things because, deep down, I knew they were actions I should have taken. I had my own problems, like my drug addiction, which was getting out of hand. I couldn’t go a night without drowning myself in several bottles of cough medicine. My speech slowed whenever a sound left my mouth. Each night blurred into the next, the haze of the medication masking my pain.

    But even in that fog, I knew I lacked the courage to take the appropriate steps to help her. I was trapped in my own cycle of self-destruction, unable to break free.

    And then came the day that changed everything.

    I was standing in the shower, letting the water wash over me, when the news of her death hit me like a cold slap. The shock froze me in place, the water pounding down but unable to wash away the sudden, overwhelming grief.

    “I know who did this to her, but I can’t come forth to say,” I murmured in the shower, repeating the words like a broken record, a thousand times more than my mind could count.

    Two days after she died, I sought out the house manager—the very man accused of betraying the trust of the vulnerable girls in our care. I told him about my need to leave the premises permanently. His face was somewhat expressionless, but I sensed an undercurrent of guilt. It wasn’t as pronounced as mine, but it was there, etched in the lines on his forehead.

    It took an immense effort to restrain myself from striking the man before me. Although what I really needed was to escape, to be anywhere but Kyauta Orphanage. Yet, strangely, I found myself unable to gather my belongings and leave. So, I resolved to confront him instead. Perhaps in the depths of his eyes, I would find a hatred profound enough—for him and for myself—that I would finally report him.

    “Don’t sweat it,” he said with a shrug. “These things happen. We do our best for the kids, but some things are just out of our hands.” 

    His words reminded me of what she had narrated he did to her on her 16th birthday. How he pressed his torso against her slender figure, consuming whatever space she occupied, while his hand stole the air from her throat and mouth.

    I stared at him, feeling a surge of anger. “Maybe I should just quit. Disappear. I can’t stay here with all these memories.”

    He raised an eyebrow. “Take some time off then. A few weeks, maybe.”

    “But…” I felt my resolve waver.

    He cut me shut . “No buts. You’re under my wing; nothing’s going to touch you. Ka ji.” 

    Then, I tried to block the mental image of the last time I saw her: her dark silhouette outlined against the stillness of her room, her slender frame lying motionless on the bed, surrounded by an aura of melancholy. Her bed was pushed against the far wall, its disheveled sheets tangled as if in a struggle. A lone pillow, stained with tear streaks, lay abandoned on the floor beside her.

    I tried to avoid imagining the perpetrator in the act. He was my reflection, aged and thickened, his features honed by the years. Clutching a bottle of pills that I eventually retrieved, I struggled to banish the vision of her frail hands. Some of the pills had fallen out of their container and were now scattered aimlessly across the room. On the floor laid the sentence she had written, a last farewell to a man she loved who had failed her: “Drowning myself.”

    Right now, in my shower, I am haunted by a truth I cannot utter. My hands, bound by invisible threads, mirror the act of swallowing the same pills she once did, seeking silence in the way she found it. Water cascades down my chest, mingling with my labored breaths as memories and emotions converge, battering me with their relentless force. I stand there, helpless, beneath the crushing weight of it all.

    And there it was—the hands that had stripped Jiddah’s innocence and left her shattered, now trying to rejuvenate me. 

    “Don’t do this, Yassir. Don’t do this. Someone, call a doctor!” His voice resonates through the corridors of my memory, reaching back to the earliest moments of my life. It’s a voice I have come to despise. It is my father’s.

    Haliru Ali Musa is an engineer whose passion for storytelling knows no bounds. Hailing from Katsina, Nigeria, he now calls the bustling city of Lagos his home.

  • 4 Poems by Chinemerem Prince Nwankwo

    Portrait Of Catch and Quest

    —this poem breathes:        precision with[out] end. 
    searching for reason . man & the finesse of dredging.
    the River:   trawl & trawlboat. portrait of catch & quest.
    find the depth —naked rostrum of plunging. catch —
    artefacts of longing & becoming. tell the River, grace of 
    shores. every bound:   the lingo burning to know, bosom
    shape of history lingering. paddle & carve fingers in the
    waters: time & memories. Isn’t it sprint of souls winding 
    in the canvas of time? or the largesse of a poem evolving?
    man —pustule of perfection angling in the et cetera of 
    being. say, a creel of self spawning in the glimpse of dawn.

    I, Decimated Self

    elegy:           she appears, 
      breaks the dead &
    rocking in         sawdust. 
            fold the sanity —
    breaks them. piece & 
    pieces apart. —goads of
    flesh prodding in grief. 
    deserted. —everything 
    at hedge of beholding. &
    you:         driveling in the
    demijohn of self. anesthesia,
        soul off the hook &
    ballast. once wore God in 
    blotched melanin. & your
    heart grappled the pain &
        it pageant away. matted 
    & tuft of a kinky spirit —
    you & the guts of no glory.

    microcosm as a body of death

    [for souls throng to the weight of life. & for a poem gazing

                                          the body in fighting arsenals]

    splinters of inner voices: 

    —he hangs a gaffled breath. holds the grapnels 
    of grief in no salvation. say his flesh ripples of  vile 
    blood. & light of his becoming alters in darkness.  never
    yielding his slouching body a miracle. why is he    an 
    anatomy of a suicidal blood? & his soul a   pendu-
    lum swung from sanity? the grisly scenes in his head
    & the daily ruffled notes soaked of solitude craves  
    an escape, the tethering symphony of goodbye. if 
    man is an owl, he’ll hoot into night loom. he’ll own  
    his soul in crucifixion. & won’t he anguish in drool gasp 
    of venom & gall? again, when life happens:  flood as
    of Noah’s, absorbs his bawls of fragility. & he sketches 
    as an apparition of things in nameless bodies. in 
    celestial pedigrees. those tiny echoes raising a fiery blast, 
    make ashes of his   protruding force to be & to
    become. his head curricles the dream of sepulchres. 
    suicidal ideation akin to him as flesh skinned to bone.       
    nay, he’s a man. yes, he isn’t a deep water. bet       his 
    body bares no oasis but the residue of a living desert. 
    pray him a good spirit ‘cause it’s no easy feat to look the 
    river without drowning. without transiting to no    return.

    nostalgia

    of a poem delicate & svelte. of things shaped in the knobs of memory. how we become & became a roadmap of a never ending you & I. perhaps it’s often said [in a soulful lingo] love is sweet with the right person. the right sacred bosom & hearty alley. the sun & moon dazzled. they always gaped at the artistry of our naked desires. say it’s a heaven’s gaze upon two ravishing mortals. I remember. yet if I do, they say it is a love poem. say it’s the art of escaping the universe. & morphing into your same shadows. bet love is spiritual. deciphered by the mouth of two eyes. two flames flickering at the sight of a single spark. you & I against the storm. against roving waters with familial siege. crystal //& pellucid is the heartbeat of a two-to-tango. maybe a poet is a love poem hidden in many couplets. one day a lover will return more than roses but an empty heart to threshold the finery of reminisces.

    Chinemerem Prince Nwankwo, SWAN IV, is currently a final year student of the Department of History and International Studies, University of Uyo, Nigeria. He is the Poetry Editor, The Cloudscent Journal and an Assistant Poetry Editor, Arkore Arts. He tweets @ CP Nwankwo.