
MY MOTHER’S DAUGHTER SPELLS HER NAME BACKWARD by Anthony Okpunor

MY MOTHER’S DAUGHTER SPELLS HER NAME BACKWARD
by Anthony Okpunor

by Anthony Okpunor
We are pleased to announce the winners of the 2018 Kreative Diadem Creative Writing Contest.
Winning entries for flash fiction were chosen by TJ Benson, author of ‘We Won’t Fade into Darkness’ (Parresia 2018). The winning poems were selected by Wale Owoade, poet and founding editor of Expound Magazine.
by Angel Nwobodo
ii
Your mother shows you pictures of her – the honey-gold beauty that is her skin, the thick docility tucked in her small body and your Father’s gaze lost in the fiery brown pits that are her eyes. You trace the line where their hands fold into each other, their bodies enclosed in a familiarity that confuses you, bewilders you. Your Father whispers something in her ear and she lets out a shy, mechanic laughter, something that rings in your ears later because you keep comparing it with the unrestrained summer that is your mother’s. Your mother sticks a knife where her mouth opens and you know she is carving a home for silence.
You see the next picture as you head to her shop at the mall, the one Father pays for each month with a cheque addressed to the manager, the one she pays for with his cooked meals and his starched suits and her wild-summer laughter behind closed doors. You see them with little moving pictures of themselves, three little boys with her honey-gold skin and her fiery brown eyes and your mother
This is the new woman in our lives, Ada. This is the solid proof of my shame.
Her voice is a deep shade of sorrow and you realize she has lost this war even before it started.
iii
You will learn that girls with no homes tucked beneath their skin are like birds who never
You will learn that the truth changes nothing- each day your mother will appear with his cooked meals and his starched suits and a smile on her face like old paint peeling from walls because any fire can be quenched by the silence of a man’s face.
You will learn that you can surrender your consciousness for the taste of a man’s mouth, for the feeling that loving gives
You will realize that girls like you were not made to find love, that they are like ghosts, looking for love and for names and for histories in strange faces just to come to life. That your mother was one of these girls. That like you, she has no claim over your Father. That like you, she was only meant to fit her body in small spaces of light to get rid of her own darkness.
You will realize then, with grief so palpable your chest splits in two, you are the echo of your mother’s shame.
by Abu Bakr Sadiq
She forgets she’s from a land of ashes
Where women are unfinished novellas
Written without titles
By sages who only spoke in silence
Some days, she unfolds into a song
Empties the
Bottled deep in her throat
On the circled edges of my heart
Until her voice is the only tune in my ribcage
She forgets the names tied to her neck
Answers to every noun too strong for vessels like her
Weak; she forgets her shadows in the kitchen
Allows her body to freely entwine
With the frozen smokes treading the skies
Some days, I want to envy her
But envy is not a song for men like me
The boys who taught me how to be a man
Said men are rap songs
With sounds of gunshots of their hooks
And lyrics jiggered by the rhythm of their messages
Who forget everything their bodies
Were never meant to be, and go chasing after
Women who’ve forgotten they are women
Some days, she cries her body to sleep
And calls it an act of bravery at dawn
Says that’s how women become men
Without asking who took the who
Out of the
Was ought to be defined by
A lot times, that’s how she forgets she’s a woman
by CJ Onyedikachi
by Kamarudeen Mustapha
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