This month we offer wings, flight, the whole sky.
In September we move with:
heat
Submission guidelines can be found here.
love,
billy lezra
Editor-in-Chief
A Haiku of Hope
Just like the eagle,
With her wings totally spread,
She rode the rife winds.
Precious Owuamalam hails from South-Eastern Nigeria, where he obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Microbiology from MOUAU in 2015. He was a 2018 Ambassador of Spanish Language for the César Egido Serrano Foundation and the Museum of Words, and a 2018 YALI West Africa Emerging Leaders Fellow. He is a Registered Scientist, a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London and a Darwin Trust of Edinburgh Ph.D. Research Fellow, studying for a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology at the University of Birmingham, UK. Currently, he holds active membership of over 15 learned national and international societies and has won over 20 international and national awards (inclusive of academic prizes, grants and fellowships). Asides having 6 peer-reviewed scientific journal articles to his credit, his (creative writing) work has appeared in The Preservation Foundation, Inc.
Exhausted Air
in the past week 13 people have told me how to breathe,
so I looked in a mirror to observe how closely I resemble a mouth
& I suppose it makes sense: my skin like chapped lips
wondering when I’m going to smooth over. the pomegranate stains
beneath my eyes that refuse to be scrubbed away, & the general way
I fold in on myself like a bitten tongue. but what people don’t see
are the clouds bleeding above me like open or close & the creases
I carry from bending to the windfall of the daily rush-hour.
I perch like a statue on stone stacks & people ask me why I’ve stopped
talking, inadvertently handprinting my balancing act. it continues
like this: their voices telling me to inhale & get my windpipes straight,
exhale & don’t crumble, don’t jam like a goddamn vending machine.
as a mouth, you’d think I’d lick my lips more often, or at least snarl,
pucker, curl, stand up for myself. but the muscles in my jaw
are hinged and settle only for gritting my teeth, purse, purse,
sigh, open &, with no regard to their 13 air-slaps, breathe
like I’m swallowing the whole sky.
Natasha Bredle is a young writer based in Ohio. Her work has been featured in publications such as Trouvaille Review, Words and Whispers, and The Madrigal, and has received accolades from the Bennington College Young Writers Awards as well the Adroit Prizes. She edits for Kalopsia Lit. In addition to poetry and short fiction, she has a passion for longer works and is currently drafting a young adult novel.
Symbolic of freedom is the bird, and it is aflight with the girl’s essence.
Hope are the very wings with which she flutters elsewhere, across the borderlines of discrimination. Against every sigh of doubt, she flies.
She flies.
Martins Deep (he/him) is a poet based in Kaduna, Nigeria. He is a photographer, digital artist, & currently an undergraduate student of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. He is a Pushcart nominee, & a Best of The Net finalist, ’22. His most recent works have appeared—or are forthcoming— in Magma Poetry, Strange Horizons, FIYAH, Barren Magazine, Lolwe, 20.35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, & elsewhere. If he is not out taking photographs, fantasizing about reincarnating as an owl as he sniffs the pages of old books in a room he barely leaves, he’s on a newsboy hat tweeting @martinsdeep1.
This month we offer wings, flight, the whole sky.
In September we move with:
heat
Submission guidelines can be found here.
love,
billy lezra
Editor-in-Chief
A Haiku of Hope
Just like the eagle,
With her wings totally spread,
She rode the rife winds.
Precious Owuamalam hails from South-Eastern Nigeria, where he obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Microbiology from MOUAU in 2015. He was a 2018 Ambassador of Spanish Language for the César Egido Serrano Foundation and the Museum of Words, and a 2018 YALI West Africa Emerging Leaders Fellow. He is a Registered Scientist, a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London and a Darwin Trust of Edinburgh Ph.D. Research Fellow, studying for a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology at the University of Birmingham, UK. Currently, he holds active membership of over 15 learned national and international societies and has won over 20 international and national awards (inclusive of academic prizes, grants and fellowships). Asides having 6 peer-reviewed scientific journal articles to his credit, his (creative writing) work has appeared in The Preservation Foundation, Inc.
Exhausted Air
in the past week 13 people have told me how to breathe,
so I looked in a mirror to observe how closely I resemble a mouth
& I suppose it makes sense: my skin like chapped lips
wondering when I’m going to smooth over. the pomegranate stains
beneath my eyes that refuse to be scrubbed away, & the general way
I fold in on myself like a bitten tongue. but what people don’t see
are the clouds bleeding above me like open or close & the creases
I carry from bending to the windfall of the daily rush-hour.
I perch like a statue on stone stacks & people ask me why I’ve stopped
talking, inadvertently handprinting my balancing act. it continues
like this: their voices telling me to inhale & get my windpipes straight,
exhale & don’t crumble, don’t jam like a goddamn vending machine.
as a mouth, you’d think I’d lick my lips more often, or at least snarl,
pucker, curl, stand up for myself. but the muscles in my jaw
are hinged and settle only for gritting my teeth, purse, purse,
sigh, open &, with no regard to their 13 air-slaps, breathe
like I’m swallowing the whole sky.
Natasha Bredle is a young writer based in Ohio. Her work has been featured in publications such as Trouvaille Review, Words and Whispers, and The Madrigal, and has received accolades from the Bennington College Young Writers Awards as well the Adroit Prizes. She edits for Kalopsia Lit. In addition to poetry and short fiction, she has a passion for longer works and is currently drafting a young adult novel.
Symbolic of freedom is the bird, and it is aflight with the girl’s essence.
Hope are the very wings with which she flutters elsewhere, across the borderlines of discrimination. Against every sigh of doubt, she flies.
She flies.
Martins Deep (he/him) is a poet based in Kaduna, Nigeria. He is a photographer, digital artist, & currently an undergraduate student of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. He is a Pushcart nominee, & a Best of The Net finalist, ’22. His most recent works have appeared—or are forthcoming— in Magma Poetry, Strange Horizons, FIYAH, Barren Magazine, Lolwe, 20.35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, & elsewhere. If he is not out taking photographs, fantasizing about reincarnating as an owl as he sniffs the pages of old books in a room he barely leaves, he’s on a newsboy hat tweeting @martinsdeep1.
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