Author: Lion and Lilac
Four Poems|Psalmuel Benjamin Oluwasheun
WHEN YOU SEE A BOY CRY Boys don’t cry, only leak. the abs & chest are wide enough to hold a torrent after every lynch. When you see a boy cry, grief has just pinched his soul. This is a sour song of dark rhythm– Its lyric is aligned with bitterness, & aches, […]
A Tale of Two Women|Oluwadunsin Deinde-Sanya|Essay
A Tale of Two Women Last year, my grandaunt died. She was living with some of my father’s cousins in a state far away from Western Nigeria but her corpse had to be brought here. To her home and her people. On the night she died, we were sitting in the darkness our […]
Four Poems|Paul Tanner
welcome to the Chrysomelidae family wanna bag? I ask. no, he says. so I scan his stuff up and tell him the price and he taps his card against the machine and there’s the beep and the receipt comes chugging out and then he goes oh actually, I will have a bag, […]
Three Poems|Peniel Gifted
I HAD ONCE I had once loved life For its zippy smiles Racing like cool igloos To my quacking fry. I had once sat Under the dismal roofs Of soaring trees, Here and there, looking. I had once crammed Particles with fickles In the greyish table Of brownish felt. Of course, I […]
Four Poems|Peycho Kanev
Reminder You must always be—you always have to be yourself. Each branch on the trees outside is different from the rest, every leaf, too. Each puddle of mud reflect the moon in its own way. The fire in the stove is never the same. The cold, too. The world is ubiquitous, the world […]
October sunset |Ramachandran M A |Poetry
east window– how many moons in the courtyard? October sunset– how many sunsets in me father? how long have you been here in the air father? who is murmuring it tonight in my ears, father? over the eastern hill full moon tonight– where could you go in an evening like this […]
Three Poems|Shana Ross
Edge I went out early ahead of the rain thinking this will motivate me to run faster to beat the storm home I found myself alone on the trails this weather is not for the faint-hearted the air swirls warm and cold the sky dark heavy coming towards us and I’m running, running to […]
Two Poems|Stephen House
built to offer wherever i stop my wandering to stay for a stint in another place be it new room or share house caravan park or tent site or in the bush alone away from others whatever country i’m currently in i create a sort of shrine or altar outside my inside sleeping spot […]
The Root|Michael Taiwo Oloyede|Poetry
I prop myself against the wall of history, trailing ancestral marks on the tongue of the lost sons of a besieged soil. I rap the brazen knocker into the good book of contemptuous strangers; bearing corns of friendship as I covet the crumbs in their wrinkled palms with gracious eyes. I splurged the ashes […]
The Walk |Mike L. Nichols |Fiction
That September our plow horse lay down and her gut twisted and she died. So when Caroline, my little angel, took sick there was nothing for it but to walk to Pashto for medicine. Though it was near November there was hardly any snow yet, but Molly knew that there soon would be, and so […]