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.

Mallika Bhaumik

This is not a frilly, mushy love letter 
to a city whose allure lies in defying all labels and holding the mystery key to a man’s heart, though none has ever been able to lay an absolute claim on it, 

Jena Woodhouse

Around midnight, the hour when pain
reasserts its dominance, a voice
behind the curtain screening
my bed from the next patient’s:
an intonation penetrating abstract thoughts

Anyonita Green

It wobbles slightly, red wine jelly.

I peer at it, nose close enough 

to smell the iron, the scent of coagulant,

inhaling through slightly parted lips

Soledad Santana

Seen as she’d hung her cranial lantern
from the roof of her step-father’s garden shed,
the parabolic formula was skipped; like two calves, we followed the fence
to the end of the foot-ball pitch.