LitPub

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. […]

Siwo siwo siwo Siwooooooooooooooo He was Nigeria’s closest instance of the Renaissance Man: musician, sculptor, inventor, sportsman, architect, scholar, mythmaker, lay philosopher, folklorist, and culture ambassador/impresario. A true Jack of many trades who strove so hard to be master of all, he was a man of  many capabilities , with a voice that was admirably […]

Dreams feel real while we’re in them. It’s only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange. -Inception This morning the air was serene and Tebogo took it all in. She was sitting on a rock at the Walter Sisulu Botanical Gardens, amongst the prettiest of flowers and the grandest of trees, […]

When the thousands of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated, they were thought to be business records, but what if they were poems or psalms? My love is the same as twelve Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light Shiploads of thuya are what my body wants to say to your body. — Jack Gilbert. […]

The power of our Muse lies in her meaninglessness – Gueorgui Pinkhassov I am on Instagram fiddling through images. I am looking at pictures by Fati Abubakar. The account @bitsofborno is titled Yerwa. Maiduguri, also called Yerwa by the locals, is the capital and largest city of Borno State in North-Eastern Nigeria. These images are […]