Poems

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

an email from a friend in Gdansk

“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)

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

Our interest at Olongo Africa is to promote the interest of African creative works, artists, writers, curators, and producers of culture, and to collaborate in ways to enhance their vision as it intersects with issues of the moment across African countries today.

So straight, so Ubuntu, steered a troubled nation

The past year recedes

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.

That evening, the prophet singled me out & asked the church to fervently pray for me

It is not difficult to understand why a volume of poems on the subject of suicide by an African poet can be a difficult thing. The subject is the last taboo, obdurate and stiff as death.

How often we find rest in the place for longing, fame in the space of hiding, the truth in the face of the neonates.

Kolawole Samuel Adebayo is a Nigerian poet with works published in Button Poetry, Glass Poetry, and elsewhere.