1.
WE NEED NEW MOUTHS TO CARRY OUR TONGUE
The boy at the mall says his name
in a polished foreign accent.
He swallows his words in a rush,
not giving his palate the time to relish his roots.
It sounds bland. Accent, is the shadow of language,
but his doesn’t mimic his origin
— there isn’t a residue of ancestry in his mouth.
His tongue cannot call his name in the spirit of his tribe.
Like an ancestral compass crested on your tongue,
a name is the star guiding you home.
There is a longing for custodians,
we need new mouths to carry our tongue.
Abu Ibrahim (IB) is a Nigerian poet. His debut poetry album “Music Has Failed Us” was considered for a Grammy nomination in 2022. His poetry has been published internationally, including in Nigeria, Canada, the US, and the UK. He has performed at prestigious events such as the Pa Gya Literary Festival in Ghana and the Lagos International Poetry Festival. He poem “When young boys go missing” won the Ink Sweat & Tears July 2024 Pick of the Month award, he is the 2024 Poetry Journal Prize winner, a recipient of the Lagos State University Debate Society Impact Maker Award for Storytelling, and the Port Harcourt Poetry Festival Poetry/Spoken Word Album of the Year in 2023.
2.
Unanswered Prayers
I cannot speak her language, my mother,
Yet it calls to me, distorted to my hearing.
I answer with a borrowed tongue, born of subservience,
Patched with fragmented understanding, a disharmony.
My tongue is no longer raw, flagrant, and unburned,
Devoid of the carvings of civilization.
I, once the wood of a forest uncarved,
Am now crafted and shaven down for amusement.
They draw to me, my father’s hands,
Wrapped in the tapestry of heritage,
Soiled with the dust of the earth he kissed to honor our elders.
Draped in the dull fabric of modernity,
I envy their crowns, Geles, and Filas.
Coated in shea butter and the esoteric patterns of the Ori,
Our ancestor weeps at her loss to the gods of stone, glass, and chrome.
Her children are hers no more, drowned in the tides of modernism,
The weaving of her rich clothing unwinds at my betrayal.
Tomorrow, I begin to weep for my own children,
As they do not speak her language either and have no home to return to.
Glowing glass screens promise to trace the branches of a family tree with no trunk,
And numbers point to cultures that are now only names.
My children remain orphans of a culture I have drowned,
But when I plead with the ghosts of my ancestors,
Hoping to mend the severed ties with our shared blood, scarlet threads,
I remember that I cannot invoke spirits whose tongue I do not speak,
And whose gods I have scorned.
Jesimiel Williams is a writer from Lagos who crafts stories and poems about life, nostalgia, dreams, and the greater themes of our world, often infused with metaphorical and esoteric undertones. His work also explores Fantasy and Modern African narratives, blending vivid natural imagery with the worlds they observe. Jesimiel shares his short pieces and poems on social channels, and when he isn’t writing, he enjoys immersing himself in films, music, and other forms of art that he finds exceptional.
3.
Singing in Tongues
One thing beautiful about choral music
is the element of language as expression.
The power of errant syllables, merging to form
more than the sum of its parts.
And no, before you ask, we are not polyglots.
Far from it, in fact.
We simply follow instructions meticulously,
maneuvering lips, tongues, and soft palates
in a deliberate system of trial and error,
reaching blindly for the sound that
best resembles the lilting character of
mandarin. A challenge, indeed, for a choir
schooled primarily in Western music.
It makes me wonder about us, a group of
majority ethnic Chinese living in a multiracial country
yet unable to speak our mother tongue.
To have to curl our tongues around
voweled diphthongs haltingly,
to handle consonants with care,
and still fall short of authenticity.
As spoken by maestro,
“You sound like a real Chinese choir.”
Honest praise that carries with it the regret of a people
who failed to master the language of their ancestors.
Goh Yong Ming Calvin is a literature educator from Singapore who enjoys exploring what different literary genres have to offer. A strong believer of ‘writing what you know’, he is enchanted by the beauty of the quotidian and how it is perceived through different lenses. He is also fascinated by the power of language to convey complex thoughts and evoke emotional resonances, and he hopes to share with others the little moments and observations in life that may otherwise go ignored and unrecorded.
4.
Do Not Come Talking to Me About Heirlooms
in the back of a lecture room, I sat and listened
to a history professor, spill theories about endangered
languages in africa. imagined my mother
tongue, whose tender words ushered my voice into
the world, slipping off my lips. all the vocabularies
i’ve gathered in my dialect, vanishing into nothingness.
imagine me thinking about what else i could hold on to
if i wake up greeting my father good morning, pops, instead
of the usual ha igfye baba, in gbagyi. thinking about the apocalypse
of our languages, i worried about what will become
of the folk songs on my phone. all that lyrical wisdom,
reduced to a naked record of melodies. on a call, my sisters
and i burn hours talking about the need for younger
generations to know the traditions of our people. i wallow
in the intricacies of my name. what am i
even talking about? my name is now known as my name only
because my grandfather wore it as his own. what a shame,
the world has seen nothing of my people, who live and die
by the waterside. who till acres of farmlands with bare hands.
our women, who cook meals in clay pots over firewood
burning between stoves of stones. women who pound yam
in mortars placed on the stomachs of their men. my people
who pull themselves out of illnesses with cocktails of herbs.
who feasted on gourds of wine, poured into wooden bowls.
such abundance of heritage. even the broken lines orbiting
my neck, are a homage to the cowries they adorned
themselves in. my becoming a wall, taken over by shadows
is an attempt to preserve the words of my ancestors in my mouth.
with my tribe marked to be facing high risk of extinction,
it feels treacherous writing this poem in English.
Abu Bakr Sadiq is the author of Leaked Footages (University of Nebraska Press, 2024), which won the 2023 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poetry. He is the winner of the 2022 IGNYTE award for Best Speculative Poetry, The Paulann Petersen Award for Poetry 2024, Margaret Gibson Poet Laureate Poetry Award 2023, and a finalist for the Evaristo Prize for African Poetry, 2023. His work is nominated for the SFPA Rhysling Award, Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, and is published in Boston Review, Poetry Ireland Review, The Fiddlehead, MIZNA, FIYAH, Uncanny Magazine, Augur Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, and elsewhere.
5.
Echoes of a Dying Moon
once, under the watchful gaze of a dying moon,
my grandfather painted the night with stories of achukwu.
of how masquerades swirled like whispering
winds, their rhythms a heartbeat of the earth.
but what if we have already lost these stories?
what if they disappear, becoming mere museum relics?
looking at my nephew & niece, i grieve i can never
show them achukwu, nor tell them how they swirled
in a dream last night, i lost my way to our ancestral
stream ezeudo, where i first buried my milk tooth
this is how it feels to lose the language in your mouth
& never find it again—like a tooth tossed upon a rooftop
i fear that if we cannot recognise the footpaths to
ezeudo, then we cannot recognise ourselves
i worry that my unborn kids will not know the beauty of marriage, where
vows were spoken under plantain trees, with palm wine, abacha & ugba
how do we tell these stories when everything changes before our eyes?
how? what dance can we dance in the face of a new song?
last night, in another dream, a woman asked me,
“where are you from? which village? who is your father?
& his father, and your language?” i shook my head— a silent:
“all i remember exists now in this worn-out poem“
Ókólí Stephen Nonso (He/Him) is a Nigerian writer whose poems have been featured in Feral Journal, Ebedi Review, Brittle Paper, Ngiga Review, Praxis Magazine, The Shallow Tales Review, African Writer, Adelaide Literary Magazine New York, Olney Magazine, Tuck Magazine, Ofi Press, and elsewhere. His short story has appeared in the Best of African Literary Magazine. He has contributed to both national and international publications and anthologies. He is a joint winner of the May 2020 Poets in Nigeria (PIN) 10-day poetry challenge, first runner-up in the Fresh Voice Foundation Poetry contest, and third prize winner of the Akuko Magazine Inaugural Prize for Poetry 2021. He was also shortlisted for the 2024 Akachi Chukwuemeka Prize for Literature. His bio was included in the ‘Who’s Who of Emerging Writers 2021’ by Sweetycat Press.
6.
Boudin
On Sundays, Granny wakes beneath a cerulean sky
Weighing the hours before Mass
Stirring heart and soul into a cauldron of swine’s blood
Ruddy as Christmas sorrel
Meting its fury with black pepper
Garden herbs
And cooked rice
Granny pipes the black pudding into casings of flesh
Moulding it into sustenance
To tame our wild appetites
Dipping the numbles into a cocotte
The size of a plenilune
Until the broth curds
And the smell of the thing howls at us
Like the tradewinds of our history –
Full bodied
Savory
Making the best of the sordid remnants of beasts
Boudin is the colour of the currency that brought us to unspoilt isles – our skin
It is the link that binds generations of West Indians to their ancestors – our blood
It is the repartee that cradles our stories – our tongue
Boudin wraps itself in a soft shell of rebellion
Licks its lips
And belches irreverently
To let hunger know
That death will have to come back another day
Hailing from the Commonwealth of Dominica, the Nature Island of the Caribbean, Yakima Cuffy is an award-winning writer, poet and playwright. award-winning writer, poet and playwright. A lawyer by profession, the prominent themes in her writing are patriotism, West Indian identity, migration, faith and sensuality. Ms. Cuffy’s work has been published in adda – the Commonwealth Writers literary magazine, The Caribbean Writer Volume 35, Midnight and Indigo Online Magazine, and the Waitukubuli Writers Anthology of New Dominican Writing. She has won Dominica’s National Independence Literary Competition on numerous occasions. Ms. Cuffy has also been longlisted for the BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Award for Writers in the Caribbean three times, emerging as a finalist in 2020 and 2024. She also performs Spoken Word poetry at various events, including Bocas Literary Festival’s Stand and Deliver segments. Yakima is a graduate of the University of the West Indies, Cavehill Campus and an alumni of the Create Caribbean Crafting Short Fiction Writing Workshop
The views and opinions expressed in the poems submitted to and or selected as winners in our contests are those of the authors. We are non-political and focused on celebrating artistic expression, amplifying different voices and views, and fostering dialogue on important themes through poetry.