Merikokeb Berhanu (Ethiopia/US), Untitled LII (2020), acrylic on canvas, 60 x 48 in. / Courtesy of Addis Fine Art
From the watchtower, you utter the suburbs
I grow up in, ripe for the benef…
Poetry
A detail from Daniela Yohannes (UK/Guadeloupe), Black Oil (2019), Acrylic on Linen, 116 X 89 cm / Courtesy of Addis Fine Art We pause at the edge of the river listen to its rhythms languid…
Photo by Terry Kearney / Flickr There should have been roses . . . Instead, I clutched red and white carnations my aunt bought from a street vendor outside the courthouse. I should have…
Daniela Yohannes (UK/Guadeloupe), Black Oil (2019), Acrylic on Linen, 116 X 89 CM / Courtesy of Addis Fine Art What we do not say to each other bites speech into ultimatums a guillotine ch…
A detail from Dereje Demissie (Ethiopia), Psychscape (2009) In Krio, there is a word with Atlantic Ocean spray still swirling in its gut: Freeborn. I heard this word often after dinner was…
Dereje Demissie (Ethiopia), Psychscape (2009) On my mind daily with the insistence of a metronome is that thin granular layer, rich humus, spare humility, black earth daily lifted and blow…
Detail from Girma Berta (ETHIOPIA), Moving Shadows XI (2016), digital archival print, 40 x 40 cm / Courtesy of Addis Fine Art after Inji Efflatoun Sarah Hegazi Malak al-Kashef …
Girma Berta, Moving Shadows XI (2016), digital archival print, 40 x 40 cm / Courtesy of Addis Fine Art after “A Walk through Intimacy,” by Theresah Ankomah Under the auspices of the…
Daniela Yohannes (UK/Guadeloupe), Subterranean (2019), acrylic on linen, 116 x 89 cm / Courtesy of Addis Fine Art there are flowers you can’t touch outside someone’s house at night, a mothe…
Merikokeb Berhanu (Ethiopia/US), Untitled XLVII (2020), acrylic on canvas, 60 x 48 in. / Courtesy of Addis Fine Art You always serve coitus with a side of cheese silkworms squirming in the…
Dereje Demissie (Ethiopia), Psychscape (2009) This poem is written in response to a news story in Spotlight (South Africa), headlined as follows: “What the Charlotte Maxeke fire…
Ch’ol embroidered shirts / Photo by Diana Laura Montejo I Am the Alphabet They say, grass born in the forest, my body holds the freshness of mountains. I have absorbed the garden’s blossoming, my…
Don’t just aim the telescope at the night sky’s swarming to discover one more planet. Turn it also toward the earth, toward the bottom of the sea, see the fish in between the rocks, a flicker of…
Poetry is not solace, it is not a song of joy and of sadness, it is not a haven in the mouth of a blind man, it is not a museum. Poetry is not an almanac of meanings on t…
Photo by Nathan Bang on Unsplash I brought mum and dad an old quilt – It’s nice, only it came out of the wash with funny splodges on it. They can stick it on the sofa bed out at the allotment. “We…
Photo by Hasan Almasi on Unsplash On the hilltop A woman said to me This fruit is called kam Kam I take the word as it comes I write it in my memory Like the three letters in the word…
Photo by Marcel Ardivan on Unsplash I propose, my love, to be for you the surface to be but body for your eyes to be but rhythm for your tongue and information for your net. – Myriam Moscona…
The children see trees bending bending and then they are broken coconutless frondless. The children see roofs in various states of disarray metal sheets lifting eaves pulled away. There’s Takaro’s ho…
Last Tuesday I wasn’t enough of a poet to note how the falling rain would split the sky It doused the fires in my heart till its casing cracked It hammered the pyramids of my mind and washed a…
Because all the fathers and mothers of my parents, all the time past, are earth. But also language, words like Spanish, gypsy, black, or immigrant…
Photo by Ajeet Mestry on Unsplash The Alarm The television had announced the imminence of an attack. Would it be a bomb? Bacteria? A weapon previously unheard of? Everyone had long known their…
you come and go checking on those figs your eyes scanning the eyelets among branches you leave the slums of the city the rain’s hand-pan roofs above the ruins you come and go checking on those fi…
The audio recording of “Simi” can be found here on the Musuq Illa website. Simi by Olivia Reginaldo Kay simiy ruwasqaykita atipanchu qilla qalluy qulluypaq qillqan Kay s…
Photo © Keiko Onoda A thousand countries in myself – There’s something that precipitates to the very bottom of such a feeling. Is everything just an image, or is this only a wasteland where images…
Photo by Artur Kraft / Unsplash Golden rice stands in sheaves in the freshly cut autumn field. I think of many exhausted mothers and see beautiful, wrinkled faces along the road at dusk. This is…
