death

So straight, so Ubuntu, steered a troubled nation

a winter in the Dolomites with my father-in-law

Organizers of Giovanni's Room unite to honor literary ancestors

What little I know of grief tells me that it does not follow logic, and that those in its throes will oftentimes grab on to anything to make sense of their feelings. In that, I could understand why he chose to rely on religion for sense.

New York Is Dead. Long live New York City.

Throughout my life, I’ve been collecting literature, poetry, and essays that shape my worldview. This personal canon is not carved into stone, but rather it’s fluid, evolving. For myself, I declare these texts important, and so, for me, they are.

Before I left home, my daughter packed the bag with food, snacks, a picture she’d colored in the car and a stuffed blue “Pete the Cat” doll. My wife told her to do this as a way to comfort Dodge, our cat, while she went to the vet.

On the afternoon of my friend’s demise, I logged in to Facebook to discover a myriad of his pictures congregating people’s timelines. In those pictures, his face was distinct, sharp; his mien betraying the darkness saturating the day, binding us in that state of sadness with the thread of mourning.

There is one very short spectrum when it comes to the way people view misfortune. There are those who look at it as mere bad luck, and there those who see it as a repercussion for the wrongs they may have done in the past. And there is a third group: those who attribute it to the work of Satan. This group is where my parents belong.

Flourish Joshua is a (performance) poet from Nigeria, a NaiWA poetry scholar, 2nd place winner of the 7th Ngozi Agbo Prize for Essay, Managing Editor at NRB, Interviews Editor at Eremite Poetry & Poetry Reader at Bluebird Review and Frontier Poetry. He is published (or forthcoming) on London Grip Poetry, Ghost City Review, Brittle Paper, Indianapolis Review, Bluebird Review, and elsewhere. Say hello on Instagram/Twitter @fjspeaks.

IT’S KIND OF hard to make out in the pictures, but we had a sinkhole in our tiny Baltimore-rowhouse front yard.

sometimes I wish my uncle would've been the fourth Hebrew brother to come out of fire alive.