LitPub

for H & to H.   death seethed into a home & did not pass through the door nor the window; did not knock, greet or smile no one knew how it got in, but when it left you went missing. mother tried to remember a passage through in your sickness or a path in […]

They slipped him in during the night. We all woke up in the morning to find him there, in a sitting position, occupying the bed beside the man who screamed God’s names each day they changed wound dressings. My first thought on seeing him sitting there, shirtless, his torso rising and falling heavily in an […]

history oft becomes second nature. a history of subservience is inferiority. history is sediment of time, sturdy like diamond to undo history, we ask time to become cannibal, which is to say we ask time to chew on its own fangs, chew itself back to the beginning, down to its innocent gums a history of […]

The handkerchief Aunty presses into my hand is white and crisp. It has the strong musty smell of old clothes. She says she got it in camp during the Holy Ghost service in August, that the Reverend personally anointed it. She repeats the word “personally”, staring at the heart-shaped birthmark on my nose. ‘Make sure […]

The tragic exploits of killer-herders in Zamfara and Igangan, Edo and Ondo; a breadwinner razed in fire for the twin crimes of blasphemy and heresy by self-appointed custodians of faith and morals; orphans dying of the throes of hunger; a woman beaten to death for the womanly crime of being a wife and mother, the […]

In Tolu Agbelusi’s first poetry collection, Locating Strongwoman, there’s a poem titled “Museum of Women,” that acknowledges and celebrates the various ways women have affected the growth of the speaker and her ongoing construction of womanhood and selfhood. The poem uses the museum as an austere aide-mémoire of women’s lived experiences, the shifting between dispossession, […]

  The girl wearing a rose garland holding tulips between skinny fingers    goes to sleep on a cold con- crete slab in the city square. It’s night & here, we are calling on hope. But just what is hope when dawn breaks /& opens up her innocence to this sad world like the gutting […]

 Even though I walk through the valley  of the shadow of death,  I will fear no evil, for thou art with me.  -Psalm 23:4 On the street where Panseke passes the baton to the uneven boomerang-shaped suburb of Quarry Road where I live, Abeokuta presents itself as a town under. Houses, small shops, primary and […]

there we perched at the heels of the rock, as we watched the dramatic retreat of the sun.   with trembling limbs crying guts and misty balls, in silence, we prayed.   caught between wala’s fall and nosi’s rebound, we saw nothing save the glimpse of our glorious return. Mohammed Yusuf-Unyomo is a Nigerian poet, […]

The mythology goes – my father’s unruliness earned him a place at the Ransome Kútì School: Straight into that institution, don’t pass go, don’t collect N200, he went. Abeokuta Grammar School was known for the severe corporal punishments and beatings administered to pupils. Fela Anikulapo Kuti, the world-renowned Afrobeat pioneer, once wistfully reminisced on the […]