Akpata Magazine

Category: Poetry

  • A Place Where the Sun Refuses to Shine – Ogbebute Emmanuel

    Far and beyond
    the horizon of comfort
    Into a jungle of huddle, puzzles and struggles.
    A place where the sun refuses to shine
    its golden ray upon the eyes of the foresighted.
    A place where souls are painted with stains of pain.
    Goals are ornamented with bitter sweet bane.
    Darkness hover like ravens in midnight hour
    Hoary smell of plight looms the tense atmosphere.
    A tomb engulfed with vision predator.
    With pride and shame,
    Like fire and its flame.
    They keep burning through every mind.
    Stormy days of fervent gloom
    Souls vehemently striving to bloom
    Like thorns and roses,
    We strive and imposes,
    Artistry to make history.
    Even though we’ve tattooed scars,
    We wish to see the stars.

    Ogbebute Emmanuel Eneche is a prolific poet from Benue state, Nigeria, who was raised in Lagos.

    Featured Image credit: Starboyscotty

  • Going Mad in Nsukka – James-Ibe Chinaza

    Going Mad in Nsukka

    Mọ́renikeji, God is dead, and I’ve been binge-watching videos on YouTube. I swear, I am not trying to be a woke babe. The world is made of blood, and we are all gut-deep lacerations, asymmetrical axes, Linea nigras, butchering ourselves like every other jolly old meat seller—swipe the knife and hackhackhack. We all eat ourselves—I ate my brother’s index; don’t blame me. What’s the difference if it’s brewing in bitter leaf broth? It’s alright Mo, like rain, you can taste the world on my lips. I do not know what killed my grandmother, but it must have been me in some way. Yes, I use her yellow wrapper to sleep at night, and it’s really no problem; she was a murderer too. Yes, I have killed more than a million men for being free. I saw a little girl yesterday; she was bent over a gutter and brushing her teeth. I told her it was alright because everybody drank blood around here. Then I told her to swallow her spit next time, or we would kill her. I forgot to tell her there was no use running because she was us and she would kill herself. I don’t understand why people think dying is such a difficult thing to do—a dog died this evening, and all it had to do was cross the road. I don’t really care, but my mother killed that dog. His name was Bruno, but that’s my name as well. Yes, the rain drowned my sister, and all she had to do was look up. The boy we shot—all he had to do was blink twice. So it’s weird to see you spending your whole life trying to die when the world is specifically made to kill you. That’s blatant insolence, but it’s effective as well—it killed my cousin last month. Not like I know anything more than you do—as you can see, I bagged a bachelor’s degree for being depressed for four years. I might stick it in the toilet or rule the world. Don’t get any wild ideas; there’s no difference between the world and a toilet. Or, I am just an educated illiterate. I don’t even know the difference between blood in the body and blood on the floor. No, you can’t say spillage because we wouldn’t have so many holes if spillage were a sin. I am not going to argue with you, Mo, because I don’t see the difference between the body and the floor. I don’t even know the difference between Bruno, Bruno, and Bruno. So, maybe we died on hot coal tar while a truck was driving a man. That is no new thing. Hey, Mo. Don’t you think ‘lived’ is such a weird word?

    Going Mad in Nsukka II: Ophelia on a Walk.

    It is 6 a.m., and all the stray dogs are minding their business. I’m not implying that the old women around here are bitches, but they don’t respond when I greet. They must think I’m mad and harmless; I bet they don’t know that I killed a cockroach last night while my roommates went yellow from screeching. Well, that’s that. I’ve got a clump of chicken shit beneath one leg of my favorite bathroom slippers, and it stinks like life. I don’t like the chickens here because they’re too lithe to be caught. I mean, on camera, I’m not a thief, you jackass. I had to run. When you hang around people for too long, they get all of their business in your nose until there’s no space for yours and you can’t breathe. I guess that means a lot of people are not stray dogs. They have hands they don’t use for walking, yet they don’t think it’s enough for them. I hate it that I’m too sane to get lost. It is fear that makes me put my pocket in my phone when a smoking, bald man passes. If I were mad enough, I would have tossed it in this puddle. Yes, the sky is too small to be a pocket; that’s why all hell is let loose. Yes, I spent last night holding back my tears because there was no evidence of my pain. I don’t think God put in all his care; I’ve been leaking all my life. This school girl’s skirt is too tight, her hair is too low, and her teeth are too dirty. She greets me, and I don’t respond. I guess that makes me the same as the old women I didn’t say were bitches. This damned phone is ringing again. Home haunts me, and I’m too sane to set the whole thing on fire. This coal-black dog scratches its right ear with its right hind paw. I wish I had a superpower like that. I bet all of these buildings are sore and miserable from not dying. Yes, death is the kindest gift I’ll be getting, but I think the delivery man made off with it. Ill luck. I mean, look at this perfectly crushed chick on this death road. Blood vaporizing. Everything is messed up because I am not it. Everything is messed up because I am not Odysseus. I don’t care about Ithaca; I just want some quiet. Yes, I am innocent; my feet are the sane ones. My concerned would be mother if she saw this, but we can keep it between us. I wish I was a stray dog. I wish I was a stray dog. I wish I was a stray dog. They can’t go home, even if they want to.

    Going Mad in Nsukka III: The Year the Poet Died

    He wrote something like, I don’t cook for my mother, but I’d cook for you. He was so good at writing bad poetry, and I loved him. Anyway, this strawberry-flavored ice cream is so sweet and cheap. I think thin slippers are for people who don’t give a fuck anymore, so I plan to get another pair of flip-flops. I called him, and he didn’t answer. I’ve been calling him for days now. I don’t want him dead, but if he isn’t, I’d be offended. Now these people want me off this lovers’ bench because I’m alone. I don’t care if they’re kissing or fondling; I just want to sit down. Byung-Chul Han said something about touch being the only way to live this life. Heck. My ass is not so fat, and if you read the last poem, then you should know that I’ve been walking. I see the moon nuzzling against the neck of this tall building, and I remember his hair on my neck. He always came with warm light. I see the moon nestled between the parted legs of this twin birch; it’s such a beautiful metaphor for sex. No, I don’t like to think of sex because all of the phrases are so violent and cannibalistic. I mean, I’m a girl, not a batch of doughnuts. I don’t know how a person can smell like cake all the time, but he did. I bet if I let him kiss me, he would have tasted like cake too. Now, I’m thinking of eating him. I’m not different from the rest of the world after all. These ornamental trees look hunched with sadness. I take a photo of them and send it to my friend, who knows a lot about trees. She says it’s a Masquerade tree, but I’m not so sure about that. I like to watch the pretty girls walking, but if they talk to me, I’ll get pissed. It’s important to watch all the pretty things from a distance; get close, and the magic will be besmirched. Everybody is in love around here; it kind of makes me not want love. I call him again, and he doesn’t answer. Maybe we’re doing test runs for the future. I really want to sit bare-assed on the sculpture of a hand holding a lamp. It says something about light and showing people the way; all I want is some air up my asshole without people calling me mad. I know I am, but the least you can do is be polite about it. I’m a simple person, really. Maybe that’s why nothing special ever happens to me. I think that’s cool because if the world has given me nothing, then I owe it nothing. Then he said something like, I want to run through meadows in Japan with you. I lied; that’s from a song I wish he sang. Well, I think he’s dead now. You know, poets like to die just to see if they really can. He did. And I can still smell cake on my fingers. I still do not know what love is, but giving him my hands was a cool reflex. I guess I should be grateful because if the poet hadn’t died, then nothing special would have happened to me this year. It’s just that I miss him, and I’ve been eating so much cake.

    A wanderer at heart, James-Ibe Chinaza spends her time walking, thinking, and thinking about thinking. She is a writer, a poet dying, music eater, and hobbyist photographer. She currently serves as the Assistant Editor of the Muse Journal, UNN. She goes by Umami_kun on X, and yellowin_teeth on Instagram.

  • Morning Worship – Grant Shimmin

    Huddled, in the freezing pre-dawn
    around a battery-powered altar
    listening for what our cold
    but eager ears wanted to hear

    We sat, a worshipful group 
    of teenage Christian companions 
    on camp in the heart of winter
    straining to make out what was happening 

    in a rugby match on the other side
    of the world, in Christchurch, where 
    barbed wire encircled the ground, along with
    angry anti-apartheid protesters 

    We knew a limited amount about that; 
    far less than I would 40 years hence, 
    as a resident of Christchurch. We knew 
    rugby, but were oblivious to the fact

    that in townships in any direction people
    were struggling to keep the cold out 
    of draughty shacks in the bitterest hour
    of a Highveld dawn. Oblivious to the 

    injustice on the doorstep of our 
    comfortable white middle-class lives
    And no camp leader would raise
    it with us as frigid pre-dawn unfolded 

    into frosty day. None would question
    the injustice, mention the marginalised
    majority’s plight, alongside the white 
    team we reverently congregated to honour

    Grant Shimmin is a poet born in South Africa in 1967 and resident in New Zealand since 2001. Humanity is his most important poetic subject and many poems about South Africa reflect, personally, on the injustices of apartheid. Work at Roi Faineant Press, Does it Have Pockets, The Hooghly Review, Remington Review, Querencia Press and elsewhere.

  • Shore-gazing – Praise Osawaru

    I am on the shore, pretending to listen to the water’s music
    with my lover. there’s no harm in knitting thoughts to comfort

    one’s self from the chill of loneliness. the body can only acco-
    mmodate absence so long before it collapses, pillars succumbing

    to a windstorm. I wish to understand how a body dissolves into
    another at the wand of love. how another’s arm becomes a safe

    house one can run into, away from the insanity of living. before
    the day began, a friend texted, saying God must have mistaken 

    quicksand for rock when he set my feet upon the ground. 
    him & I are both photographs on the wall in a room

    dead dark, yet I say everything lost will come alive with the sun
    & he embraces it as a prayer. what hasn’t eluded any of us?

    ask the hen what it dreams of, and it will tell you winging the sky,
    like a bird. this is how we carry on as everything becomes sour

    & half-dead, even us. still on the shore, I fall backward onto 
    the sand & caress my shoulders, a plain attempt at relief. 

    I pretend I’m not a hollow in the well, a music box
    without a song, a tulip blooming in the meadow of longing.

    Praise Osawaru (he/him) is a writer of Bini descent. A Best of the Net, Pushcart Prize, and Nina Riggs Poetry Award nominee; his work appears in Agbowó, FIYAH, Frontier Poetry, Down River Road, The Maine Review, 20.35 Africa, and Uncanny Magazine, among others. He’s the first-place winner of the 2021 Valiant Scribe Poetry Prize. He’s a Contributing Poetry Editor for Barren Magazine and an Associate Prose Editor for Chestnut Review. Find him on Instagram & X @wordsmithpraise.

  • How to Tell My Body I Love You – JoeMario Umana

    after Georgia Ifunaya’s Self-Love 

    running water
    from the shower
    becomes hands
    & crawl my skin
    like cover crops over soil, 
    planting a million pimples 
    on my body—a land fertile
    with want. 
    I slide into the tunnel
    of my left palm’s index
    and thumb, 
    slippery like okra’s draw
    made from soap and water. 
    this is how I tell my body
    I love you, 
    a fellowship with eyes closed, 
    desire popped up
    like opened picture 
    on phone’s gallery, 
    and breath caught
    with body trembling
    —a flesh quake, 
    the world dead. 
    then an exodus of self
    —a coming out. 
    and surrendering
    into guilt’s arms
    feeling all filthy and sinful
    remembering what the pastor says
    about my love and a fire
    that never sleeps
    and will never turn
    my body
    to black powder
    but offer
    an everlasting pain, 
    the water
    from the shower
    washes it all away
    along skin, 
    semen and soap lather.

  • Placed in a Place – Merlin Flower

    Placed in a place

    To 
     

    the rain
    that edged on
    only as a muffled scream

    gobbled by a car and then a truck.

    To

    the rain 
    that came back,
    more furious
    with the cyclone.

    water rushed
    everywhere

    knee deep in water, I paused with one
    leg in the air
    open manhole? 

    The water took off with a black shoe
    with pinky pink soles.

    I walked ahead like an elderly baby

    To

    The rain
    That spared me.
    I fad you.

     Merlin Flower is an independent artist and writer

  • Osholonge – Onoberhie Janet Ojevwe

    A street divided by both the doers and the saints
    A street divided by the houses: dilapidated and well structured 
    Divided by different tongues, practices and beliefs
    Time to time, blue and red sirens come visiting 
    With full force, taking into captivity the doers and the saints.
    Fearful mothers shout at their Saint sons “Go inside”
    For fear of the blue and red sirens.
    The saints, the opposite of the doers, carry their head 
    High up and with scornful looks reserved for the doers.
    The saints – the pen and book of the street and 
    The doers – worshippers of the night
    For it is the only time they can fees
    And in the morning, tongues and pointing finger arise
    Whose son did it?
    Which gang did it?
    Unending question and guesses 
    With unknown answers
    The street ever busy in the morning and at night
    But scanty at noon
    School children come back by noon
    Parents at evening 
    But doers do not return for they have nowhere to go.
    The street never changes
    Years after, a new set of saints and doers arise
    Recycling the process over and over again
    The street never gets tired
    During my years of existence, the street remain the same
    But with a different set of saints and doers

                                                                   

    Onoberhie Janet Ojevwe is a Nigerian and a final year student of the University of Benin where she is currently in pursuit of a Bachelor’s degree in English language and Literature.

  • Lover Prelude – N Sehar

    After Zaina Alsous

    Inside the eyes is a river. Inside the river, some loose fragments of tree 
    Inside the tree, fish skulls, salt buried in the chest of the earth, unnamed 
    Forgotten lovers. Inside the lovers, a sea of sorrow. Inside the sea, young 
    Men drowning in the bloom of youth looking for bread  and tasting citrus.
    Inside the men, a woman’s broken anatomy. Inside the woman, a lifelong 
    Of yearning, hanging cliffs, grief stuck in the gaps of their teeth. Inside the 
    yearning, a botanist’s plantation theory. Inside the theory, a recipe of 
    remembering. The thing is I never wished to go knocking door to door 
    Looking for the bones of the dead. I never really wished to surrender my softness.
    I just kept staring at the eyes for too long. I was spilled through seeds. I 
    kneeled to kiss the pupil and steadily sank it. 

    Sehar is a poet, freelance writer, and design student who is currently based in Kolkata, India. Her work has appeared in The Hooghly Review, Gulmohur Quarterly, Broken Antler Magazine, Livewire (The Wire), Poems India, The Alipore Post, India Film Project, and Remington Review among others. She loves to read about cultures, folklore, and anything that lies at the intersection of art and tech. She is passionate about environmental causes

  • Two Poems by Mercy Musa

    A Body Performing a Disappearing Act

    Like lace dipped in vinegar sorrow
    the nature of my narcissism is translucent,
    this body, almost transparent, almost fading to nothing
    this skin, almost disappearing, almost syncing to dust

    If only I could hold light in the palm of my hands,
    push bits of it under each layer of my skin
    maybe then will heaven see
    how much this body aches for visibility
    to be seen as it is, brown and in bloom

    Speak of a body and watch as this body disappears,
    blends with the dark and makes love with its shadow.
    speak of a body and watch as my mother’s hands slip right 
    through this body at every attempt to hug pain away,
    speak of a body and watch as this body vanishes under my lover’s eyes.

    Nightfall in Igarra

    The moon tonight is dimmed
    from sipping too much darkness,
    the clouds are blending towards
    nothing. I am trailing behind my mother
    into the night, with clay pots etched under our arms 
    & our feets pressing into sinking grounds.
    we are before a stream and before we dip out pots
    we first sing. first appease the bending trees and resting waves 
    with air suspended in our lungs, we sing
    we sing for the stream in Etuno, our local dialect.

    Mercy Musa is a Nigerian writer who writes from Lagos state . She is a lover of African literature and fantasy books. Her work has appeared in Green Black Tales magazine and The Muse Journal. 

  • Jaundiced – Hibah Shabkhez

    You and I, ma chère langue étrangère, we stand on the banks of the Loire, ruefully watching our poor twisted paper boats lurch downriver in the sunset-gilded waves. The sun simmers steadily upon the same crinkled place, but our broken sentences roll away with the water, last vestiges of this shipwrecked decade, of the bitter harvest sown when first I wrote you a lie. But you have grown, lingua mia, while I have fumed and lamented and remained mired; you have learnt what I could not learn: the true quality of mercy, the art of forgiving the unrepentant. It is you, the betrayed, you, into whose wounds I have spent a decade twisting the knife, who holds out a hand now, you who smiles first with acceptance and understanding. You would help me overcome even myself. I am the one who cringes, who seeks refuge in lonely bitterness with its reassuringly familiar gall and impuissance, because we betray those we love, over and over and over again, when the memory of pain is stronger than reason. If we are lucky, we betray them one less than the number of times they can bear to forgive us. If we are lucky.

    Hibah Shabkhez is a writer of the half-yo literary tradition, an erratic language-learning enthusiast, and a happily eccentric photographer from Lahore, Pakistan. Her work has previously appeared in Pleiades, Miracle Monocle, Glassworks, Windsor Review, Moria, CommuterLit, and a number of other literary magazines. Studying life, languages, and literature from a comparative perspective across linguistic and cultural boundaries hold as a particular fascination for her.