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I. Night Gods at FeastAfter Wendy Xu’s Several Altitudes of Not Talking a sign here reads: Sell your deadInvert the batteries. this is, of course, an error. mine or the sign maker’s. our headlights in lieu of distance, travel the length of eyes. anoint the sheen of a gate. we approach at this uncontrollable hour night gods at feast; local beer and pink-bodied chickens held in a spit:the world is a puzzle…
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REINVENTION I The rope of distance broke you sat there reinventing Lagos islands got drenched inside us black crows torched our scars the lessons of attraction the avalanche might actually get kinder wandering in all capes but the death of desire is not what you keep hearing about II Soon all this will be memory stitching yourself into a blue sky, an open door that’s what it says in get-aways…
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a road’s tale the road is a riddle with a thousand answers —Niyi Osundare the road is one trickster of an angel divining destinies at a deserted holy-trinity round: to dawn’s hope a path to noon’s heated light another and the last, to night’s final cry – silence when i wake up in the morning the road lies ahead of me in wait full of prayers – answerable and…
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ADDIS HOT BOX Two Addis sisters locked shoulders in a jello mould of jazz. The club was a hot box of twinkly stars and loose laws of rain. Smoked a pack of Nyala hoping for a husband that night. Spent decades in the bathroom, zipping up my past. It was midnight when I left, street dogs were falling in love, Howling commitments far exceeding any I had made In my…
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Coming to Lagos The landscape is first within. But the stream of crab buses makes calls into spaces, perches for gregarious birds. One laying on you as awareness. The bodies are hurried motion, blending through distance. The metrics on a dioptra are found vocabularies, motioned eloquence articulating the depths and meters; hoary metals troubling through a climb: the arcing ebb towards the Island. Then he is welcomed by the…
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