Tag: Lion and Lilac
Just One Slap: How ‘Blood Sisters’ Highlights Domestic Violence
Reviewer: Adeola Gbalajobi Nollywood has often been accused of producing subpar movies, with questionable storylines and poorly developed characters. Sometimes, it is guilty as charged. But occasionally, Nollywood offers its vast audience a sparkle of brilliance, going beyond its insular storylines. And I think with Blood Sisters, Nollywood went all the way to give […]
Four Poems|John Grey
MORNING IS Morning is a sparrow perched on a rooftop, trilling short sweet notes. Or a blue jay circling, hacking like an old man clearing his throat. It’s not me. It’s not my yawns. It’s not my knuckles rubbing their way into my eye sockets. Morning is always beyond the window. It’s a flower nudged […]
Four Poems|Ian Mullins
Behind The Bar Paddling in piss, the gents unblocked, I steer a course back behind the bar. Lisa pulls her last half-pint while I count the tips and lock the doors. We wait for our lifts in the drooling rain. A police car slows down to examine our faces, turning off its siren as […]
Four Poems|Paul Tanner
spoilsport my first shift, they sent me out with a shopping list: coffee? check. sugar? check. butt plugs … wait, what? butt plugs? I rolled my eyes at their wit and went back … the boss and supervisor were waiting: did you get the butt plugs? the boss asked. I said no. but you […]
Resist The Muse of Sadness|Adeola Juwon Gbalajobi|Poetry
Resist the muse of sadness, still the pen till your heart buzzes with gladness & beats like joyful hymns. Resist the muse of sadness, don’t line your verses with metaphors of sorrow & imagery of pain. Let your pen dance with joy. Write about the scenic morning &the sonic birds, the colourful flowers that […]
Three Poems | Taiwo Odesanya
In This Green Land In this green land, we do not breathe Oxygen, We breathe fear for we do not know, Where and when the next bomb or shot will fall, In this green land, we do not speak the language of love, It’s ethnic hatred that oozes from our mouths, We hide like Chameleons, […]
Four Poems | Michael Brockley
Aloha Shirt Man sings Rosalita, jump over the lion while he walks his German shepherd toward Halloween. He’s trapped in a mondegreen prison where he a capellas ain’t no woman like the one-eyed Gott and all the lonely Starbucks lovers. In this detour through cities built on sausage rolls, he is born again in a […]
Three Poems|Ahmad Al-Khatat
The Song of Life A song you’d be thrilled to hear, with eyes sharing their sorrows to the nightingale a grief’s mouthpiece takes me to innumerable nostalgia We hear the lyrics of the song, as clothes become wet from sobbing to the morning daylight, not moonless nights… Wings In the Wind Periodically, I see […]
Two Poems | Tolu’ A. Akinyemi
No Room for Racism Would you take the knee with me? Would you speak out in my defence, Screaming that there is no room for racism? Would you take the knee with me As a symbolism of equality? Would you speak out in my defence, That Black Lives Matter? Would you take […]
Post-Partum | Oloyede Michael Taiwo
pro caffeinating in the throes of this whitlow in my head, rheumy, blustering, sharp; suffused in a maelstrom of emotions this pain is oval, a tear in the gum large at the base turbulent, with a curved face, and vertices symmetrical to an Alzheimer’s wreckage a swoon in the long in the tooth soot of […]