Grief

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, […]

A Great Mourning I am learning to mourn All the parts that lay hidden In the whirlwind of my heart, Parts that were  Too sharp to leave Too alive for a dead world. I am leaving these parts  By the shores of seas And lands that remember my scent, I’m stretching until it feels  Like […]

What comes to mind when you talk of echo:   Are the abandoned buildings emptied by the noise of wars; Lofty buildings for the tourists and their guides in years to come.   Are boys searching for the voices of their missing parents, Under the heaps of dead bodies, hungry heads.   Are the girls […]