A small portion of your wings / Housefly, lies here before my eyes.

Here eats young and old.

As soon as the smoke dispersed, a gorgeous woman with glowing dark skin was standing there.

We become our parents’ dreams. / We must now find a way to be free.

Maybe these streets swallow us whole

She sighed. “Everything grows here,” she said, pulling out more weeds. “If it’s strong, it lives. If not, then it dies.”

She leaped from her window and became a swarm of bats.

Last night, she came into the world of my dreams and rocked it upside down. She was all of splendour and beauty.

You hum the words of the poem again and again to the boy, smoothing his hair over and over as you do so. Already, you know that there is no more sleep tonight. You know this is where you will lie till the sun shines through those dancing curtains.

and the girls all carry something common in their dirge/

These men all knelt between their thighs.

The first time I saw the devil, I was four and didn’t quite make sense of what I saw. The second time I saw him, I was a year older and more articulate, but it was only for a fleeting second.

I wonder what you think of how I look at you. How my hands linger when I touch you. I sometimes wish you’ll fall into my hands in total surrender, just like the cashew fruit.

We’ve seen it all, really. Yet, we still fall into the trap of a single story—every single time. We still think that we are either this or that; we can’t be both; we can’t be everything all at once.

The guard whispers to his colleague in a tongue I’m too familiar with, the one whitened with otherness

Why fit in if I lose myself?

The room felt as if the earth had veered off its axis. The fan yet swirled. And Alice’s heart beat erratically in her chest. She had a voice, but she seemed to have lost it.

I walked around the casket and saw Grandma’s distorted body.

There were fat men, enormous men, short men, men with bald heads, men with full beards, and gaunt, ashen men. They all had one thing in common. Seated or standing, they had their legs splayed and were contorted in various stages of pain, their expressions a montage of horrors.

I wonder if I could pray for it, but would God honour a prayer of death? 

Ani Kayode Somtochukwu on his writing