LitPub

Mashood Ọlábísí Àjàlá’s wild ride of a life began on a bicycle. In 1952, the Nigerian writer, then 22 years old, biked for 2,280 miles from Chicago to Los Angeles; his 28-day journey was featured in newspaper reports, attracting the notice of many notables. That July, Àjàlá, described in newspaper reports as “personable,” lectured at […]

PERSONS CHIEF GUARD 1 GUARD 2 VINCENT ADAMMA BAYODE CATHERINES ABASIAKARA IDARA BELLO LEILA EXTRA TRANSGRESSOR _____________________________________________ Afternoon in a hall. A middle-aged woman, CHIEF, sits at a table on the podium, going through papers. A door opens and two female guards herd five men in handcuffs into the hall and make them stand in […]

People who have followed me on Twitter may have come across occasional posts of mine with nothing more than the photo of a book and the #Mood hashtag. It had been my own way of sharing the discovery of particular books that have sentimental value to me, to the culture, or books that could, at […]

Barter Because it’s 1945 And the Allies put a war horse over a west African infantryman, A boy is traded for a horse. A boy is traded for a horse, The horse gallops giddy in a bottle, The buyer follows inside to fetch his horse. and drowns. A boy is traded for a horse his […]

The stars lament his passing From Soweto’s seething streets to Bora Bora Kings, Queens, and Presidents flood the sky With tributes and purple garlands There goes a man In whose middling physical frame Throbbed a giant heart. Prophet who divined One complex rainbow in a land Ripped a-p-a-r-t by the colour creed He saw the […]

The past year recedes like a chameleon’s tongue— a miss, I am not taken. Before my mirror, wiped with the nectaring newness of the year, I am the visage of a boy styling his life into a poem, resolute to say more, to do more, like a semicolon; Bryan Obinna Joseph Okwesili is a queer […]

John was never the biggest kid in the room. In SS1, he was barely 5’7 and weighed just under 50kg. There were bigger boys. Boys with the height of a pole and the bulk of a boxer. And they knew it, that they were bigger and dangerous and powerful. So, they taunted the smaller kids […]

All the lights call it a day. All the marigolds go to sleep. The finches manufacture music from the latex of their throats. Let troughed tangled briars beg the earth for a moment. Let winter sit still & patient. There is no remedy to song severed in the neck. There is no remedial way to […]

First you must imagine everything in sepia.  The big fight. The broken bottle. The fire, all of it. I can’t even feel guilty, that’s the evil in this, even if what I meant that night was taken off the edge of the alcohol. What were you saying? Did it matter? Do the things we say […]

She works for a Chinese family in a modest-serious restaurant specializing in buffets of Sushi. It’s temporary, for sure. Her apron waits expectantly, like a boxer’s towel, to be thrown into the hospitality ring. Minimum wage. Student gratuity. He wants better for her than this. Their battling at present, he’s fully aware, is his fault. […]