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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. […]

I.    Among all the genres of music I heard constantly as a child, classical music came to me and stayed. Growing up as the son of a clergyman in a close-knit family immersed in religious rituals, music was a constant tie that held each passing day and gave meaning to my preoccupations. My family […]

That evening, the prophet singled me out & asked the church to fervently pray for me that in a vision, he pulled me out of a room of cobwebs & that an old woman in my father’s house hid my star in a black pot buried at the base of a baobab tree. Outside my […]

Everyone likes the idea of home as a safe place, a comforting, anchoring soundness. But sometimes this safety lies not in the familiar but in the complex challenge of exploring new vistas, away from all that was previously held dear. Especially when home is that place that takes instead of gives. The upbeat documentary, Blind […]

Ṣesí. T’ọkọ T’aya. Tóyìn. A pause. Ánklùs. This is how I know I am close to home: tarred roads give way to dusty ones narrowed by gullies that claim more of the road each rainy season. The names are of bus-stops leading to Òkè-Àró, a confluence town where my father chose to build his house. […]

  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 […]

Someday I’ll love Kwaku Kyereh after Claire Schwartz  / after Ocean Vuong   Kwaku, you have loved—& you have been loved, where the skin did not break is where it blackens.   Give thanks, Kwaku—give thanks, to the trees & the wind that gives them rhythm—to the   birds that learn to make a home […]