content warning: none Every Story I Tell Contains Me Every story I tell contains me, If you know how to look inside. I am but a bird trying to be free. My cage is gilded, held fast by lock and key Although I yearn for…

Remember Macaroni jewelry boxes? The first one for Mother’s Day was always a surprise. We need the elbow ones Ms. Merriwether said. “Don’t waste this food. There are starving children everywhere.” We need Elmers glue. We need paint too. A smoking box I think. “We…

Cousins What have you gathered my children, and where are you going? In through the front door and straight out the back. gardens await you, while the sea meets the shore. Will you carry your gatherings across generations? Place them on your mantle, remembrance of…

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Boys and girls on the playground flitting from one group to another like busy working bees. The sound of gravel punctuates their movement like a garbled staccato measure and kicks up the dry smell of dirt. Eager hands dig up mounds of grass and cup…

tiny heart beats madly excitedly they’ve given me the instructions which float like strips of rainbow from my jaw – as you proceed they’ll send you more and more to carry be willing you can do it with me are beating thousands and thousands of…

The Wednesday night crowd around the big table center of the brewery beer hall was middle-aged men boisterously playing cards trash-talking howling with delight at winning hands or someone missing a bet, bid the beer, the game was all flowing we were living semi-vicariously two-tables…

Hour Twelve –   Beyond Biafran War    Mary Pecaut   In a circle they gather on the banks of the Qua Iboe River sandaled feet firm upon Akwa Ibom soil. Swaddled in colorful cloth, the Paramount  Chief pours libations inviting ancestors and all that is sacred to soften the…

Can we choose to surrender the preconceived assumptions, notions, suggestions to find meaning beyond the shores of language, to break the chain of absolutes, to make words breathe freely from the trapped monotonous semantic and textual worlds to make them spin perch delicately?   Can…

drumming circle  another group of those : half humans : burnt by the Pulse : possibly made mad : by the pain : have surrounded our camp : i’m angry at myself : i didn’t even know we were being followed : perhaps the winery…