Trauma

i damage you─ beautifully. late evening nurse. i come with a bloodless adze, glucose meter & a satchel full of thermometers & ice packs. i put my fingers in your mouth & record your temperature. i detect everything; the hot breath of roof pressing heavily against your knee & quiet volcano in the compression of […]

I am not terrified  of the dark. I do not know  if the arms of God  would hold me  like poetry has done  every time my floater resurfaces  as I spiral beneath the waves.    When I break, does God break too? Why must I do all the breaking alone?  Look at all the healing  […]

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, […]

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 […]