Stories and Poems

Archive | Stories and Poems RSS feed for this section

Features, Lit Scene, News, Stories and Poems 2018/09/17

Read Chapter One of Novuyo Rosa Tshuma’s New Novel House of Stone

Novuyo Rosa Tshuma’s novel House of Stone, an exploration of family history, colonial Rhodesia, and the birth of modern Zimbabwe, was released in June, in the UK by Atlantic Books, and in South Africa by Penguin, and is forthcoming in the US from W. W. Norton in January, 2019. The novel, which comes with blurbs from NoViolet Bulawayo (“Tshuma […]

Read More 0 Comments

Features, Stories and Poems, Submission 2018/08/17

Two Mothers | Omotoyosi Salami | Poetry

I wake to my mother’s face contorted in prayer. she speaks all the names of my creator, praising Her. my mother’s tongue is a holy book parting in two, one end loving me spoiled, the other bringing me back to the face of God. in my grandmother’s house, I wake up to her kneeling for […]

No 4. Marina Street | Romeo Oriogun | Poetry

EVERY DAY I watch them walk back home wet with the smell of the market, trays balanced on their heads. It will rain. It will not. The truth is here: nothing prepared us for the moment when their bones shivered like lovers ready to part from each other. By the door they peel off their […]

The Tyre | Raul Bimenyimana | Fiction

Felix went to each of the contestants, all three of them, and made them move their right extended feet so that they nearly touched the not-so-straight line that he had made on the ground with a stick. Having made sure that there was no room for foul play, Felix glanced once more at their feet […]

Read More 0 Comments

Features, Stories and Poems, Submission 2018/07/22

Mid-Life Crisis of a Major God II | Stanley Princewill McDaniels | Poetry

– As for life turning out to be all what no one ever wanted it to, how we surely confuse existence with, say, finding the meaning of life – an object around which everything gathers & ungathers like a crowd, or how a major god searches for Heaven in the body of another, as for […]

Read More 0 Comments

Features, Stories and Poems, Submission 2018/07/06

Twelve Sins & Makoko | Two Poems by Othuke Umukoro

Twelve Sins janvier, 1990: name and claim. At least that is how it begins with boys like me who entered the world backward. février, 2020: in my father’s house my mother wears fear round her neck like a golden bell and with each step my father’s thunderous tolling on her skin—like that time she shaved […]

A Man’s Portrait Changing Faces | Two Poems by N. N. Emmanuels

A Man’s Portrait Changing Faces i. Momma says the worm a bird eats it remembers: a cloud of sweat, an earth of blood, a heaven of deficiencies. She trolls our senses to somewhere deep where water crowns the origin of man. ii. Home stands on mother’s crow feet. That’s why whenever we see the lotus grow […]

Read More 0 Comments

Features, Lit Scene, Stories and Poems, Submission 2018/06/23

Your Kink Is Not My Kink | Siphumeze Khundayi & Tiffany Mugo | Exclusive Photo-Essay from Gerald Kraak Award Anthology

The following photo essay—“Your Kink Is Not My Kink: African Queer Women and Gender Non-Conforming Persons Find Sexual Freedom in Bondage,” by Siphumeze Khundayi and Tiffany Mugo—is an exclusive republication from As You Like It, the 2018 Gerald Kraak Award anthology (pages 136-142). * African cultures have long celebrated sexuality, with a history filled with customs and […]

Read More 0 Comments