Old Man Jacobs

 

By Alan Bahr

 

A weed-covered field was all that passed for a community park, with shops on either side that begged for a coat of paint and paying customers. We were visiting my father’s hometown accompanied by my Uncle Doug, who was regaling me with tales of his youthful indiscretions. The stories were hilarious and told with the shit-you-say flair of a prison confession. They little resembled my father’s sober recollections, which made me wonder why Dad couldn’t be more like his older brother.

Doug nodded toward the park and said it had once been a ballfield. He chuckled and pointed to where the backstop had stood.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

“Just thinking.”

“About what?”

“How I blew up second base.”

I laughed, recognizing a prelude to another good story. “How’d you do that?” I asked.

“Got my hands on a stick of dynamite and a long fuse. Lit it and ran like hell. Hid over there.” Doug turned and gestured toward a building across Main Street.

I tracked his gaze and imagined him at my age, a teenaged boy cowering behind a shop wall, hands over ears, waiting. “What happened?” I asked.

“Made a big hole.” Doug let out a loud guffaw.

“I remember that.”

My dad whispered the confirmation in a way that told me what would follow: another dousing of cold water onto our day’s entertainment. Earlier that morning, he’d exchanged words with Doug that were as close to an argument as I’d ever heard pass between them. He told my uncle to be careful of what he said around me, which prompted a terse reply. It’s a free country, little brother. All my dad could do then was sigh in a powerless way and speak what had sounded like gibberish to me at the time. You think freedom is doing whatever the hell you want. Which is why apprehension follows you everywhere.

My father stared at the site of the old ballfield, then at the sad storefronts on either side of it. “Blew out nearly every window,” he said.

My smile disappeared. “You were there, too?” I asked.

Dad shook his head. “I knew better than to follow your uncle out at night. It took a month to replace the panes and clean up the mess. That’s what I recall.”

Doug looked down and kicked at the dirt.

“And there was that other thing, too,” my father said. “Remember, Doug?”

My gaze went from father to uncle, then back again. “What?” I asked.

“Tell him,” Dad said. “Go ahead. It’s a free country.”

Doug put his hands in his pockets and jutted his chin toward the second-floor apartment over a hardware store. “Old man Jacobs died that night,” he said. “Fellow didn’t make it out of bed. Not my fault. Heart attack, they say.”

We eyed the building, not saying a word, when the double doors opened and a chime sounded. We watched as an elderly couple stepped outside and walked away.

Alan is a recovering investment banker and former commercial fisherman. His short fiction and essays have appeared in Midwest Prairie Review, Circle Magazine, Banyan Review, Contra Costa Times, and others. He lives in the San Bernardino National Forest with his wife.

 

The "Sky Above Clouds" Just Looks Like the Sea

 

by Jamie Benner, After Georgia O’Keeffe

 

All lines are liminal

at rest on the horizon.

The sienna sky

leaves glaciers

like neighbors

dissociative expanses

cuffed in unfamiliar hues.

A ship’s corpse sinks

just out of sight.

Beneath, slip shapes

of pitch—

a mother, a calf, a sea

filled with strangers,

faced with a choice:

to splinter or stay.

Jamie Logan Benner holds a PhD in English from the University of Southern Mississippi and works at Acadian House Publishing. She previously served as Managing Editor at The Pinch, Product, and BreakBread magazines and Associate Editor at Mississippi Review. Her writing appears in Prairie Schooner, New Ohio Review, Barrelhouse, and elsewhere.

 

Weak Link

 

by tomra vecere

 

I open my eyes to see the pony rocking back, turning on its haunches, and vanishing into the swirling flash of horseflesh. Moments before, the gate had slipped from my seven-year-old hand and whooshed open. The metal creak and resounding clang alerted every horse to my blunder. They lift their heads from their perpetual grazing and curve their long necks to face me in unison, eyes wide and ears forward. No one ever lets the gate swing the full ninety degrees, windshield wiper-like. The horses smell my terror and my youth, but mostly they are yearning for the possibility through that gate. I stand frozen in the opening. I hold my ground, hesitantly. I was not supposed to let this happen. I had no instructions for what to do if it did. Had I acted quickly, swung my arms wide and yelled, I could have run them to the other side of the pasture. I might have retrieved the gate and avoided what happened next: our horses, the boarder’s horses, stampeding past me, closing in on the perilous highway we lived near.

I conjure myself as a horse in their herd, running flank-to-flank to Delsea Drive.  Would I steer us to the Delaware River or the Atlantic if I were leading? I wanted to hear the whisper that pricked their ears forward or back according to the source of sound or mood, to feel the involuntary quiver of skin on the withers that telepaths: Run. I coveted their secret language, desperate as I was for true communication and connection, belonging. I longed to be the confident leader they galloped blindly behind. Nothing was chasing them on that day, these prey animals—only confinement made them run for somewhere without fences, the open plains calling. Pure instinct.

After clearing the gate, the horses do not bolt for the highway. They serpentine and circle and their pounding hooves alert my parents almost immediately. My father assesses quickly and commands: human chain! I am the smallest, weakest link in this chain, this attempt at a living, moveable corral. Decades in the future, my father will apologize—I am sorry I was weak— in a note he leaves for us to find. My fingers reach for the fingers of the person on either side—my mother, my father. We spread out at first, only to move in slowly, deliberately, closing the circle. The horses run madly in front of us, wild and licking at freedom, they can taste it if they can only get past one of us. A Palamino pony charges me, and my father manages through the Red Man chew in his mouth: “Don’t you move!” With confidence I pretend to have because I was told to, I close my eyes and wave my arms forward, synchronizing my movements while yelling the guttural cowboy “Ha!”

Tomra Michelle Vecere lives in Gloucester Massachusetts with her husband, Newfoundland Enzo, and a rotation of Guiding Eyes for the Blind pups in training. She has been published in Creative Nonfiction Tiny Truths and International Women's Writing Guild (IWWG)’s Network magazine. Twitter @VecereT, Instagram @t.michelle.v

 

Ebullition of Spirits

 

by micah daniel mccrotty

 

for Jon, who said it.

 

Men came by the house near old Tanasi  

with polite stares hunting hooch and spring water,

their query sometimes the frost of panther

breath. Yet wary of popskull and rotgut,

they asked after corn squeezin’s and mountain

dew, shine or maybe banjo fuel when seeking

a rye smile, their various terms a mild

secrecy in reference to the maize

mixtures of Bloody Butcher, Neal’s Pay, or

Jimmy Red. Those bubbling worts mashed into

white lightening tasted of old and new wines.

Some men beat it then took their pull while others

held each jar like a lucky turtle foot

or Cherokee mortar in reverence

for the creek clear remains of native grains

filtered through immigrant stills, a likker

sought for its nearness to history and forgetting.

Micah Daniel McCrotty lives near Piedmont, Tennessee with his wife Katherine. His poetry has previously appeared in The Midwest Quarterly, Louisiana Literature, Spoon River Poetry Review, Sycamore Review, and The Hopper among others. 

 

the flight of crows

 

By danny solomon

 

I tell you that you can always know a crow by their laborious flight

that you can know them in the air because they pump their wings harder than it seems they should

and that they never get as far as their work promises.

 

Now you have some options:

One, you don’t or can’t know what I’m talking about because you’ve never seen a crow or you don’t look at birds.

Two, you’ve been there, beneath the bird, and you know the body of the crow in flight, or you’ve read something like this in Sibley’s Guide, so you agree or disagree.

Three, what I said is helpful to you because my words describe a world you’ve never pinned down, and now you can distinguish the hard-working silhouettes of crows against the sun.

Four, you didn’t hear me.

 

Five, you are a crow.

Six, you are the air.

Danny Solomon is an ethnographer and natural historian of settler descent living in the occupied Ohlone lands of the SF Peninsula. His recent work can be found in The Gravity of the Thing, Shirley Magazine, Dream Pop, Teleport, and Middle Planet, or at danielallensolomon.com. 

 

Rapture

 

By mary crockett hill

 

 

draw your thumb down the surface of this stone

knot and dent              thrum like bone

 

the knot of sky, the dent of lip—

where a river refuses to forget

the gravity that moves it

this is my body

given for you; do this and this and this—and if you do,

which will be forgiven, which erased?

which word gives the slip?

 

you did forget: i am the word. do this.

i’ve washed your enemy’s tongue with my own. 

 

i’ve washed your enemy. i am my own.

 

and that fleck of light on the broad side of the hill,

 

o light in a basket of light—

 

is this worth

my telling?      

 

will the sky wait for

my kiss? 

Mary Crocket Hill is the author of the poetry collections If You Return Home with Food and A Theory of Everything, and the novel How She Died, How I Lived.

 

I Wake Up & Deja Vu

 

By Idman Omar

 

Will I always be black,

Muslim and a woman in this country

reading faces

shield against shield

in the long, cheap working hours?

Will there always be

these awful months of fear

when I am foam of the sea

chewed skin and

a low, slow immigrant who

whispers the call to prayer?

Originally from Somalia, Idman Omar is a British freelance writer based in London, England. Her poetry has previously been published in Southbank Poetry, Guernica, Wild Court and Rattle amongst others. Idman is a MA Creative Writing graduate from Birkbeck, University of London.

 

Nowhere To Run

 

By Olumide Manuel

 

After a documentary with the same title by Yar'Adua Foundation Production

 

It is either the dying of a country or the country of bodies

Stacking an unrest to the molecules of nature, agitated

 

To a song of buckets, buckets of overflowing plunder.

In my mother's nightmare lake Chad waned to a battleline,

 

The migration of ploughing hands to the thighs of rifles,

The cruor we butter into ethnic tensions, how the North

 

Pours toward the Middlebelt with hunger and strife.

Benue man will say, the desert you run from has ran

 

Into my harvest basket, and now we run into eachother

With blames and knifes. Down South, the fish bellies

 

The crude oil, and a child smokes it for dinner. Now fire

Glares the evening skies of Niger delta, a testament

 

Of how the wreckage of creeks has made black dragons

Out of boys, black widows out of girls, and a stained

 

devastation out of cities struggling to breathe underwater.

A pregnant croc had swam into our store before she awoke

 

From the slumber of nightmare, the flood has blurred

The boundaries of where the sea ends, where the land begins.

 

Where do we go from here? How do we safe ourselves from

The slumber that eats our country into a graveyard, overridden

 

With debris, under claws, inside the silent lament of voices

 Crow-walking the high walls of a weakened green body.

Olumide Manuel, NGP IX, is a writer, a biology teacher and an environmentalist. He is a nominee of Pushcart Prize, and the winner of Aké Climate Change Poetry Prize 2022. His works have been published on Magma Poetry, Trampset, Uncanny Magazine, Agbowó Magazine, Up The Staircase Quarterly, Frontier Poetry, and elsewhere.

 

Mahsā

 

By Bhavika Sicka

 

Fold out the hems of history

as I emerge from its rolled edges

and I pass the priest who is a man

as he chants the prayers of men

and I pass the poet who is a man

as he pens the songs of men

and I ask the prophet who is a man

why he wrote a book for men

Fold out the hems of history

as I emerge from its rolled edges

and I offer my veil

to a fantailed

flame

Bhavika Sicka is a Kutchi Gujarati writer settled in Norfolk, Virginia. She has been a finalist for the Times of India's 'Write India' contest and a recipient of the Dickseski Fiction Prize awarded by Old Dominion University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Hunger Mountain, Lunch Ticket, Pleiades, Waxwing, and Beltway Poetry Quarterly, among other journals.

 

Once We Knew

 

By Corinna Rae Reilly

 

It’s as simple as this: once

we knew everything, then took

shape as human. Reeds woven

 

into basket, this container

that is your body. Simply: you

were born. You were born

 

to a lineage losing

its way. There were burned

maps, smoke inhaled

 

by sky, songs held in the throats

of our mothers, swallowed

& forgotten. But nothing can be

 

forgotten for good.

Know this: you are not

to blame. You were born

 

with the frantic pulse

of city in your wrists,

impulse to beat your own

 

heart, its persistent

unwelcome whispers to look

for something more. Once

 

there were stars, but our lights

made them lazy. There were birds

whose songs in springtime awakened

 

the dead,     and trees

who showed us how to give

ourselves over to the pull

 

of mystery we’ve been taught

to call the end. But nothing ends. Nothing

is forgotten. We were born to trace the maps

 

of our bodies toward the weak

beat in our chests, dig – dig –

dig – toward the faint songs

 

of our mothers held in our own tired

necks, toward the pull of mystery.

We call it the end but we were born

 

to remember: it teems

with beginnings, birdsong

Corinna is thankful to live surrounded by trees in New York's Hudson Valley where she shares her home with four wonderful beings - her husband, two dogs, and cat. While her poems have been published in Pleiades, The Submission, and elsewhere, that was about a decade ago. In that time, she has not stopped creating but has mostly kept her work to herself. After a long hiatus, she is once again nudging her work out into the world.

 

Presence

 

By Robin Turner

 

What falls away is always. And is near.
             – Theodore Roethke

They have been over and around us, above
and below us, reflected on water, all weather

and wonder, steadfast and absent, a storm.
They have been name-that-shape as we gaze

from the grassy banks, chariot for saints
and for sinners, soft cotton batting, friend,

apparition. Today they are the stuff of my mother’s
late dreaming. They flood the snug room

where she sleeps. God calling, she tells me
from this side of slow waking. Heaven

trying her on for size. She pushes Heaven away
with her hands, swats at God as she would a pest buzzing.

We drink tea honey-sweet, steep ourselves deep in the Here
and the Now. Mother’s clouds Holy Ghost it to the next town over.

I watch them gather, reconfigure in the near distant sky.

Robin Turner has recent work in Bracken Magazine, Ethel, River Mouth Review, and in the Dream Geographies project. A longtime community teaching artist in Dallas, she is now living in the Pineywoods of rural East Texas for a spell. She works with teen writers online.

 

Morning (Sabah)

 

By Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar

Translated by Aysel K. Basci

 

Open your window to the cool winds!

Look at that tree change at dawn

Watch the lightening of the horizon

Let your sleepiness glide from your eyes.

 

Allow the wind to play with your hair.

Don’t hide from it your silvery naked body

For it’s a different kind of spring.

 

Let captive lips touch and caress

Everything you have: neck, hair, breast

Since you are more beautiful than the night!

Serin rüzgârlara pencereni aç!

Karşında fecirle değişen ağaç,

Bak, seyret ağaran rengini ufkun

Mahmur gözlerinde süzülsün uykun.

Bırak saçlarınla oynasın rüzgâr.

Gümüş çıplaklığı bir başka bahar

Olan vücudunu ondan gizleme.

Ne varsa hepsini boyun, saç, meme,

Esirden dudaklar okşasın sevsin

Mademki geceden daha güzelsin!

Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901-1962) was a Turkish poet and novelist, widely regarded as one of the most important representatives of modernism in Turkish literature.

Aysel K. Basci is a writer and literary translator. Her work has appeared in the Columbia Journal, Michigan Quarterly Review, Los Angeles Review, Critical Read, Aster(ix) Literary Journal, Tint Journal, Bosphorus Review of Books and elsewhere.

 

Cold Reflections

 

Image description: The head of a kayak on a still river, trees on the skyline, sun reflecting off the water.

By Laura Remington

 

I dip the paddle right, swing it over and dip it left. My kayak glides across the still surface, slicing the mirror. Water dribbles from the paddle. Warps reflections. Only loons talking. Cold water. Sparkles like diamonds.

We were on that rafting trip on the Youghiogheny River, Rafe and I. Water shockingly cold. A recorded voice warned if you fell in you could lose the will to live. So dramatic. We laughed. Couldn’t stop laughing.

The ring. I paddle along the shore. Still seeking. Not finding. The water is warmer here near land. Warm enough to swim.

Not there. On the Youghiogheny. The rushing water was just as cold on shore. We dipped in and out. Fast. Laughing. Warmed each other up. They weren’t lying about the hypothermia. Tent for two. Small blue velvet box. Ring size.

Later, on the Boundary Waters, mosquitos were the size of lemons. Black flies more like cantaloupes. Both voracious. Water still and cold. We paddled all day. Mostly silent. Less laughing. Our tent was more elaborate. Comfortable air mattresses. A real cook stove. My finger bare. Sparkle gone.

The ring knew. It told me before he did. Has it found its way to Lake Superior? Is it on the muddy bottom below? In the middle of the lake, I set the paddle across the deck and slow to a stop. When I look down, I see only my reflection. I lean back and tip my face toward the sun.

Laura Remington lives and writes in Northern California, but at heart she’s a Yooper, born and raised in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Her fiction has appeared in several publications, including Jabberwock Review, Barstrow & Grand, Third Wednesday Magazine, DASH Literary Journal, and Clackamas Literary Review.

 

My Mother on the Phone

 

Image Description: A backyard with a brown fence and large, looming trees.

By Michaela Brown

 

My mother on the phone with her mother flicks her tongue

the way she does when she reads me the single Dutch book on my shelf.

 

Down the stairs, she lumbers, phone pressed to ear, ear

absorbing the strung symphony of guttural verbs, short, sanded-down

 

declarations I know are such based on inflection alone.

My mother on the phone in our backyard, feet on an empty bucket

 

feet pretending they are standing on black, yellow, red land.

My mother on the phone speaking faster, my mother on the phone laughing,

 

my mother on the phone with her mother wants to “say hi”

want to envelope me in their language I do not know. Are they not always

 

using their mother tongues? Are they not always mothers

speaking? Three daughters on two ends of the phone and who has mothered

 

my tongue? I want to sing this national anthem,

I want to write this poem. Between Oma & me there is more than an ocean.

A recent graduate of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Michaela is an EFL teacher currently based in Vigo, Spain. She is the first place recipient of the 2020 Marjorie Stover Short Story prize and has previously been published in Laurus Magazine, The Coop, and Dailyer. You can find her on Twitter @mikienbrown.

 

Wildland Urban Interface

 

Image description: Frosted blades of glass, close up.

By Russell Brakefield

 

Sharp clarity in the yard today.

A river of spring snowmelt

adorns my ankles in icy lace.

The dog moves like a mountain

beneath clouds of wrecked lilac.

There is no stink here, no char

or drab blankets of smoke.

A light wind turns chimes

on the porch. The box of mint

and Russian sage—braised

suddenly in bees—hovers above

the earth. And why am I so lucky?

In neighborhoods just north

a horse runs burning from yard

to yard to yard, it’s mane and tail

flickering in the fog, it’s coal-

black back saddled with ruin.

Russell Brakefield is the author of Field Recordings (Wayne State University Press, 2018) and the chapbook Our Natural Satellite (Harvard Square Press, 2022). He is Assistant Professor in the University Writing Program at the University of Denver.

 

I Don't Need Permission to Dirge But

 

Image description: three panels of wood, seemingly worn down with dark smudges.

By Amanda Gaines

 

on the hottest day of the summer, my body decides

to fucking lose it.        Wails

 

on a phone line to its beloved, daydreams

colliding into a brick wall at fifty MPH, abandons

 

the house of a best friend without explanation.         I wish I could explain

the fleas burrowing beneath my wood floors,                        the torn hole

 

in the tire of my lemony Volkswagen,          the accordion list

of unsent emails & academic protocols & untended sisters

 

a thousand miles from me back east, the partly part-time job

I picked up to keep the lights on.       My fear of being too much & never

 

enough.          Truth, a friend tells me, isn’t confession. Desire

usually does the trick.                         I try--I want to watch my man

 

bike down a black diamond

in sexy silver leggings. To play Two-Dots & eat ice cream, to give

 

my stretch marks beautiful girl names. To book it

back to Appalachia, to find a small cabin stocked with bath bombs

 

& cheese puffs & VHS copies of horror movies to help me

sleep.               With a disco ball & speaker system that bumps

 

Pinkshift on repeat.     With every stuffed animal I’ve ever kissed

on the forehead without shame.

 

In the real, rain plays withholding.     Girls I once dropped

it low with in hot pants get married to mediocre men.           My sister

 

buys her first car & I am not there     to witness her smile

overshadow the skyline.         My mother texts me

 

You can always come home.   I pull out

my hair in a feedback loop, leave evidence of loss

 

everywhere I go.         I want to scream

in an empty room until my esophagus splits its seams.         To pretend

 

I still have a say over my future.        To be held

like a child, to have nothing

 

to prove. To don stilettos & get in a bar fight with J.D Vance

knowing the right kind of hooked anger

 

can bring any bully to their knees. To feel the pressure of a tongue

between my legs,       look down

 

& find my man ordering take-out.      My idea of luxury:

not begging for what I need.   How luxurious it would be

 

to paint my nails with glitter in candle-lit room with friends & talk

art, fearless.     A luxury: a self-cleaning stove, a heart

 

that can give without breaking.          A storm cloud that lingers

over my Oklahoma threshold, promising

 

Not soon--now.

 

Amanda Gaines is an Appalachian writer and Ph.D. candidate in CNF in Oklahoma State University's creative writing program. Her poetry and nonfiction are published or awaiting publication in Barrelhouse, Willow Springs, Redivider, New Orleans Review, Southeast Review, The Southern Review, Juked, Rattle, Pleiades, SmokeLong Quarterly, Ninth Letter, and Superstition Review.

 

The Flock

 

Image description: Silhouette of a flock of birds flying across an orange sky with a bright sun behind them.

BY SWATI SUDARSAN

 

Siya had been holding a tornado in her gums for so long that it was more startling than relieving when the thrumming finally stopped. The tension in her mouth had released when she saw the predator’s jaw snap over a scarlet bird on her screen. She grew lamplit and silky beneath it, allowing her soup to splatter over herself and the floor. It was her first night alone in her old house. Her apartment was gutted -- the only things left inside were a desk, a mattress, and of course, the screen. It was a behemoth that took up almost an entire wall. Shawn had purchased it, despite her finding it stifling. Now its insularity allowed her to tread deep into the recesses of her thoughts.

The bird had landed cleanly without flinching. She had watched the scene frame by frame, comprehending the bird’s temerity. The camera panned to the cliffside where birds brooded along the rocks. Their home was a gate between the river and the clouds from which blueness peeked out, as if mirroring the water helped it materialize. The birds dove from their roosts, throbbing through the sky like ink splattered by a vortexing plate. They flew in abstract shapes, occasionally hewing off a bird or two. The flock didn’t look for them. Those birds were as gone to them as ashen stars on a cloudy night.

Siya paused the show. Her calves glowed blue beneath the screen, blending out her bruises. They were fading to a soft yellow that hardly showed anymore beneath the brownness of her skin. A few weeks ago her legs had been streams, her skin flowing over shades of peat moss and algae. After Shawn hit her, she had held herself up like a discarded carcass. A fragment of a shell.

The frozen screen showed the murky foam of the river’s edge where waves kissed onto the shore. This was where the predator lived. Still the birds dove down toward the shore to unbury seeds and crab remnants. Siya decided she did not feel sorry for the bird in the jaw. Instead she mourned the birds in the sand. They ingested whatever they uncovered, never seeking a life beyond the mercy of the beach. They could not understand the bird in the jaws, who left behind insistent purrs from the cliffside to finally experience its heartbeat in its throat.

Siya knew there were other birds like that one. Birds who pummeled chest-first into splintered rocks. They knew how to turn the entire flock like the fold in a banner. And birds snatched mid-air into an eagle’s claw. They knew the relief of being carried by the beating of someone else’s wings.

Siya played the show again. As the scene rolled forward, she forgot the ripples on her legs. She noticed between the flying birds were their blood red feathers, floating upwards. They floated slowly and unpredictably toward the clarity of the sky’s untouched blue.

Swati Sudarsan is based in Oakland, CA (Ohlone Land). She has received support from the Tin House, Kenyon Review, and more. She was the runner-up of the 2022 So to Speak Contest Issue, and has work in McSweeney's, The Adroit Journal, Maudlin House and more. She can be found on social media as @booksnailmail

 

Omíyalé

 

By Eniola Abdulroqeeb Arówólò

Lagos flood killed three siblings, four adults—NEMA

it is hard to imagine how water too can be a villain
wearing the face of soft rains. until there's puddles


until brothers on an errand is munched by a flood.
how swift it is for glee to alchemize into ruin without


sympathy for who carries the aftermath. when Okri
wrote famished road, he was sharing his massive


waterloo with avenues too. and sometimes, you step
on the road's tail too long you end up a bowl of dinner


somewhere far away where vultures busy themselves
with your guts. Èkó arómisá lègbe lègbe, i am learning to


escape every livid eye of the sky lest i fossilize in the calloused
palms of rain—a blessing shower i banged on God's door


once as a kid to gift me as if a parcel of birthday's present. a boy
down the street went to school some weeks ago and never returned.


they found his remains at the shore this morning. the sea that brought
him must have thought: you don't kill a flower and eat its tendrils.


or who gnashes teeth at the tiniest misery miracle of boneyard burial?

Eniola Abdulroqeeb Arówólò is a Nigerian writer and a member of the Frontiers Collective. His works have appeared—or are forthcoming—in 4faced Liar, Rulerless, Perhappened, Kissing Dynamite, Lumiere Review, Temz Review, Afritondo, Fourth River Review and elsewhere.

Twitter Handle: @eniola_abdulroq