LitPub

I love my country. But America Courts me — the man with everything.

They will ask me when I know, I’ll sigh and say not so long ago. It happened in fragments—piece by piece you came and filled up the empty space—and in a matter of time, you became my world.

I come from the country / Of the Happiest People on earth, / Where death sells at ten for one kobo / And the Living envy the peace

I still remember my ball boy training you have to squat with your left leg simultaneously kneel with your right leg perpendicular to your left so even if you miss the catch the ball is halted by your legs at a 90-degree angle I often missed the catch even before my strokes

Ìyá Àgbà Every ẹsẹ of Odù, every word of ìwúre, every atom of àfọ̀ṣẹ that would make this day had been wept for, sweated over and bled on by Ìyá Àgbà. Patience had never been her thing, she wanted all her things done now!

It seems to him that he deserves the Nobel Prize for Laziness. He sees his head assassinated by idleness, digging swirls of silence in his blood in a similar way to digging gas lines in the street where he lives.

“We have a lot of insecurity in Nigeria. By road we are not safe. By train we are not safe”. (From a survivor of the Abuja-Kaduna Train bomb; Mon., March 28, 2022)

Lack of funding is an unfortunate scenario that has bedeviled a great number of African literary magazines and companies like ours, too. Save for a number of magazines such as Omenana, Agbowo, Olongo Africa, Isele magazine, and others who pay, the many others do not.

Afternoon in a hall. A middle-aged woman, CHIEF, sits at a table on the podium, going through papers. A door opens and two female guards herd five men in handcuffs into the hall and make them stand in a line before the podium, in the order of their appearance. One, GUARD 1, stands by their side; the other, GUARD 2, by the door.

Barter Because it’s 1945 And the Allies put a war horse over a west African infantryman, A boy is traded for a horse.

The past year recedes

There were bigger boys. Boys with the height of a pole and the bulk of a boxer. And they knew it, that they were bigger and dangerous and powerful. So, they taunted the smaller kids and took their lunches and asked them to hang upside down.

Ernest O. Ògunyemi is a staff writer at Open Country Mag. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Joyland, Tinderbox, Sierra Nevada Review, Journal Nine, The Indianapolis Review, Down River Road, Capsule Stories, No Tokens, The West Review, The Dark Magazine, Mud Season Review, Agbowó, Isele, and in the anthology 20.35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry III. He is the curator of The Fire That Is Dreamed of: The Young African Poets.