Today’s choice
Previous poems
Annah Atane
Bloody September
Boko Haram fighters staged gun and suicide bomb
attacks on a military camp outside the University
of Maiduguri in Nigeria’s northeastern Borno state
~ TheDefensePost
That night,
the stars had slept. The wind
silent as something dying.
I stood in the marrow of my
dread, waiting.
I had seen this before. The earth
shredding in the sober
year of 2014.
The soldiers had told us to
lie flat on the concrete, and
cup our hands for God.
I pleaded for grace, it’s flair
of swiftness to escape my sins.
The girl beside me ruffled her phone,
she beckons on home.
And this is how a mother
in her slouching chair,
finds her child dangling
in the teeth of prophecy—
returning home in a box.
I, in the midst of all the
screams and gunfire
busted with saltwater and insanity.
I remember the days
when it was all firecrackers.
Annah Atane is a Nigerian writer. She has been long-listed for the Bridgette Poirson Prize for literature and is a 2024 Voodoonauts and 2025 Sprinng fellow. Her works have appeared in the Brittle Paper, The menniscus, The Muse journal, Valiant Scribe, The Kalahari Review, Ric Journal and elsewhere.
Abiodun Salako
a boy grows tired
of dying again and again.
i am building him a morgue
for Thanksgiving.
Patrick Wright
It’s as if the dream
is telling me we are still joined
somehow, despite waking
and me trudging on, even though
your voicemail is off, your locks
changed.
William Collins
We carry the shame of Paragraph 352D
folded into suitcases at foreign borders,
where love is questioned like a crime,
and disbelief stamped heavier than visas.
They tell us to run for our lives —
but only if we can do it quietly.
Oz Hardwick
The ghost of my mother knows the names of everything, but
she can’t tell me, because ghosts, whatever you have heard
to the contrary, can’t speak.
McLord Selasi
I walk the flat barefoot,
step over old dreams
still curled like cats
in the corners.
Warren Mortimer
& you’ll understand if i leave open this theatre of air
not as the invite for another loss
but to honour their world unwilling to collapse
Jena Woodhouse
Language reinvents itself,
coruscates in signs on walls;
falls silent, mute as clay and stone
on tablets that enshrine its form.
Martin Rieser
The river is an old demon
& my heart is an infirm creature
The river is sure of its way
& my heart is capable of lies.
Sreeja Naskar
glass-tooth morning.
salt mouth.
i left the stove on just to feel wanted.