JOG IN THE RAIN by Carl Terver

JOG IN THE RAIN by Carl Terver

JOG IN THE RAIN

by Carl Terver

She saw the new pair of trainers in the cupboard, fine white things wrapped in a transparent bag. Only, the size was smaller. She knew Dami jogged every morning because she had been waking up beside him these days.

Dami was a quiet guy, in a way any hermit would covet. He smiled gently and walked as if his heels avoided the ground. Nobody knew what he did save that he jogged every morning.

‘Maybe you should jog to Lagos one of these days,’ she said to him when he returned from one of his jogging adventures in the morning, while she gave him a glass of water. As he gulped the liquid his eyes fell on her belly whose bulge, which he expected to see, was not showing. ‘I would,’ he answered.

She kept a journal since she moved in with him because she knew her life had changed. She had fallen in love with him and now was out of school because of the baby. She had to write down the things noteworthy of this change, like the uncanniness of her lover whom she knew only a pinch of; the man she’d spend the rest of her life with, maybe.

There was little conversation that went on between the two of them. With someone like Dami, it was hard to start one. When she’d left her father’s house for his place, she’d expected to meet him very unsettled, but he wasn’t. He’d simply asked, ‘You’re pregnant?’ looking at the luggage she carried. ‘Yes,’ she had nodded.

‘How do you feel’ he asked.
‘Fine. Okay.’
He sat on the arm of a cushion, perspiration all over him. A collection of poetry was on the table. ‘You’re reading poetry?’ he asked.
‘Yes, I found it.’ She didn’t want him to take her up on it. Before now she’d only known poetry as a form of art, especially inspired by love.
‘You know, there’re some poems marked there. There’s this particular one.’

She met him at an art exhibition. She’d seen the flyer for the exhibition on Instagram. The venue was close to her house. She was more curious than interested; art had nothing on her. The only thing she knew closest to art was her little brother’s pencil drawings.
‘It’s called abstract painting,’ he had said to her when he noticed the painting’s magnetic effect on her.
‘I wouldn’t know,’ she had responded, turning to the voice that had interrupted her sudden affinity to colours on canvas. And something had buckled inside her. He was saying something about the painting, how the kind was done to make humans see beyond the ordinary …
‘It’s transcendent,’ she finally said.
They both shook hands and talked for a while. She had wanted the painting but couldn’t afford it. ‘You can have it,’ he’d said to her.
‘Thank you,’ she said, repeatedly, till the moment the painting was packaged and given to her. Even as she collected it, she curtsied still saying, ‘Thank you.’
The following days it was the word ‘transcendent’, and not her gratitude, that Dami remembered like the tune of a naughty song you kept humming because you woke up with it on your lips.

 ‘… ‘The Good Morrow’. Have you read it?’ he continued.
‘No,’ she said.
‘You should,’ he said, too.
She was quiet as she sat on another cushion. The conversation had yielded things to write down in her diary.
The room was big, deliberately so. It was both bedroom and living room without demarcation. There was a bed at the far end by the windows. There was the wardrobe. Everything in its place. Small stools, a study corner with a table lamp, a miniature shelf (he wasn’t a heavy reader), and other hardware.
‘It’s a big compound . . . Where is everybody?’ she asked.
He started joltingly, then recollected himself. She hadn’t seen it, he thought.
‘In Canada.’
It wasn’t enough. Her brows went up.
So, he continued. “My father used to, well, still works with this manufacturer. He had a big promotion. He took everybody…’
‘Except you,’ she finished.
‘I was in the Navy. I could have followed them then, but I had other plans.’
‘What plans?’ she asked.
‘Well, I calculated. After ten years I could resign from the Navy with a pension, and I would have the house. Just me. Alone.’
Then, she wondered if she had intruded on his aloneness. Her eyes were focused on a point on the wall. She followed his conversation, but his voice came to her from the point on the wall.
‘Did you see it?’ he asked.
‘The trainers?’ she thought, saying.

They walked past the area in front of the porch of the house. The front door to the house was locked. And she commented, ‘I was looking around. It’s like every other part of the house is locked.’
‘I think so,’ he replied.
The ground of the compound was filled with gravel, strands of grass shot up from the pores. The coat of paint on the walls nearer to the ground had turned to flakes, revealing cracks that resembled the boundaries on a map, some part of it, fallen off. Spirogyra fried by the sun coated the walls, too. They passed an overhead water tank, inhaling the rust on the metal architecture that supported the tank, their feet making crunching sounds against the gravel.
They were now at the backyard.
He produced a key and inserted into a lock to a door that was hidden in dried vines. It opened into a void. Blankness. They couldn’t see anything; just shafts of light from windows high up the walls of the interior that shaped into a hangar sort of. A sound was heard – the click of a light switch – and the space was flooded with fluorescent lights. She said nothing. She just stood and took in the sight.
On the night of that day, as she lay on the bed before slumber came to borrow her consciousness, her eyes were wet. There wasn’t much to know about her lover than she would know, but she knew he was the man God had sent to her.
‘I’m an artist. I paint, but I don’t like people knowing about it,’ he’d told her when they both stood at that door gazing into the plethora of easels and canvases and paintbrushes and colours and brightness.

It began drizzling in the early hours when Dami presented the new pair of trainers to her to try on. It was a bit funny to her, but she did.
‘I want us to jog today,’ he said.
‘Today? It’s raining, my pregnancy . . .’ she said.
‘You’ve never jogged in the rain before. It’s sweet. You’ll see.’
So, she went out with him, that morning, in the rain, initiated into his ritual. It was sweet as he had said. Tiny droplets of rain fell softly against her skin. The cold weather was kind, mildly so. They held each other’s hands as their trainers touched the earth and leapt making wet-soil noises. She felt the blood warm in her body even as her heart pulsed. And since that day, mornings when it rained inspired a feeling in her: Something transcendent.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Carl Terver, b. July ’91, loves to listen to Bob Marley’s ‘Who The Cap Fits’, is a Nigerian writer and poet who have been published in Brittle Paper, Praxis magazine, Expound, and The Kalahari Review, and forthcoming in The Offing. He is working on a book of poetry criticism, Dead Images Don’t Walk. He is a comma disciple and fan of Adam Gopnik. His forthcoming poetry chapbook is For Girl at Rubicon. He is an in-house writer and the assistant digital Editor at Praxis magazine.

MARIA CRUSHES ON GABRIEL by Patron Henekou

MARIA CRUSHES ON GABRIEL by Patron Henekou

MARIA CRUSHES ON GABRIEL

by Patron Henekou

I dote on you so much

That

I want us to date

In the name of the scriptures.

 

Oh Maria, let your will be done

And we will restart the calendar.

 

But you know

I’m civilized now and don’t mind having

The Baby out of wedlock

Though people gossip too much these days!

 

Show me your virgin boobs

Oh no, no-no-no, not in their kerchief, Maria

Let’s see if they really stand with the dots straight on them.

You never believe me:

I dote on you. I dote on you.

Well you can think or believe whatever you want.

I don’t even say I am still a virgin with silicone attractions

Oh Maria, you-miss-understands-the-world, today.

It’s not a matter of “believe”. You’ve placed your doting

On the cross. Just nail the thing up:

Anything about how you feel

And please fill in the gasps with what you want from me now

Using simple punctuations and spiritual emoji!

 

Maria, people are waiting to re-write the scriptures.

It’s you I want:
Your lips, full, look divinely crispy and warm
I dream to wallow in your arms like ice cube in brown whisky
It’s you I want, Gabby, and not the script-mongers of holy crushes.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Patron Henekou writes poems and plays and co-organizes the Festival International des Lettres et des Arts (Festilarts) at Université de Lomé, Togo. He writes in French and English as well and translates. His poems have appeared in anthologies such as Palmes pour le Togo, Arbolarium, Antologia Poetica de Los Cinco Continentes, and The Best New African Poets Anthology 2017, and in poetry journals such as AFROpoésie, Revue des Citoyens des Lettres, Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, The Kalahari Review, and Better than Starbucks. His published books include a play in English, Dovlo, or A Worthless Sweat (2015) and two poetry books in French entitled Souffles d’outre-cœur (2017) and Souffles & faces (2018). Patron is the 2018 African American Fellow (now Langston Hughes Fellow) at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival in Delray, Florida.
THE MELODY IN HER PAIN OPENED ME by Patron Henekou

THE MELODY IN HER PAIN OPENED ME by Patron Henekou

THE MELODY IN HER PAIN OPENED ME

by Patron Henekou

I was there in front of her
Listening as she spoke.
The words came out free,
Unobstructed
But not smooth:
There was a faint tremolo in there
To spring the prairie in her
Smile. I sat there to
Catch the words but
Only the melody in them opened
Me and whiffed through the skin
Of my blood, like the stalks of a genocide.
Face to face first, then face to profile
her words came
With the same gloss
Like a work of art seated on a
Tanned street in the middle of
Gunshots and laughter and tears
Mixed with passionate kisses of lovers
parted in dreams of dictators.
I could see her heart run walk-walk
Then walk run-run beneath her breasts
Recounting past memories and family pains
While reaching for a word to draw her
Hope
In a sky of white clouds and
A moon laced with names of foreign lands in graffiti.
– In her office, her lips could not say my name so
She wrapped it in the pages of a hibiscus
And placed it in a poetry book inside her eyes. Run
Her left palm on the cover as if to
Take the flame in my name.
I stood and she stood with me
Now she passed through me and
Said, her eyes almost closed: how is your son, Sitou? –
I was sitting there beside her, in the restaurant
Her words stood out free,
Coated in a faint tremolo to
Spice the sun in her face. The melody in them
Opened me.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Patron Henekou writes poems and plays and co-organizes the Festival International des Lettres et des Arts (Festilarts) at Université de Lomé, Togo. He writes in French and English as well and translates. His poems have appeared in anthologies such as Palmes pour le Togo, Arbolarium, Antologia Poetica de Los Cinco Continentes, and The Best New African Poets Anthology 2017, and in poetry journals such as AFROpoésie, Revue des Citoyens des Lettres, Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, The Kalahari Review, and Better than Starbucks. His published books include a play in English, Dovlo, or A Worthless Sweat (2015) and two poetry books in French entitled Souffles d’outre-cœur (2017) and Souffles & faces (2018). Patron is the 2018 African American Fellow (now Langston Hughes Fellow) at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival in Delray, Florida.
LOVE TALES by Eghele Akpere

LOVE TALES by Eghele Akpere

LOVE TALES

by Eghele Akpere

It was love’s lullaby
That turned the heart blind;
To the unloved one,
The wisest lover is a fool.
 
It was love’s blindness,
That cursed the fool brave;
The lame, for her said,
I’d leap over a hill.
It was love’s whispers,
That forced the fool out of his life;
She said, I’m scared,
 Take my bullet; and he gladly did.
It was love’s sweetness,
That got the heart stuck:
Repeatedly singing,
I’d be blind, I’d be your fool.
 
Yet in love, we all fall,
Always.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

 I am Eghele Akpere, I live in Warri. I am the author of a novel, Diary of a Warri Boy. I am a geoscientist, who loves discovering new things. I keep on understanding myself more, and I found out that I love poetry (for the beauty of it). I get better, as I appreciate corrections.

GREEN LIGHT CANDLE by Ray Ndebi

GREEN LIGHT CANDLE by Ray Ndebi

GREEN LIGHT CANDLE

As a whisper she came into my life
Riding the winds like a dream in the night
The voice of hers I heard and so in love
I fell with the white wings of that innocent dove
It seemed she had crossed many horizons
Many green pastures, many blue seasons
Many mountains with their peaks at their feet
Many suns that have gone to warm from heat
To have a stop here, at the door of mine
And tell me “you are a link of the One”

Photo credit: www.efdreams.com

Photo credit: www.efdreams.com


For she came right from the blooming future
Where smiles are the wonder of the nature
The spark in her eye was that in my heart
She was like a candle with a green light
Gently dancing in the night of my day
Silently leading me along that way
That path between elephants, tigers, and snakes
Eagles, widows, werewolves and sharpened flakes
There is no time in the brown eyes of her
And there is always enough space to share
She was born with the hot tears of children
Born with the bow that smiles behind the rain
Born with the blood and soul of a blue throne

Born to crown life with a wonderful dawn.

kd-poem-plate-34

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
My name is Théodore René Ndebi, born in Cameroon. I graduated in Banking Management. But what really makes me proud and happy is WRITING !!!!! I started writing around 1990. I write the most I can.
I mostly write for children’s future. As a child, I had always dreamt of a world where poor children and orphans could be happy as well. I have many unpublished collections in French: Chaque Jour Un Poème, Rêve D’un Soir, La Missive Du Petit Prince, Suis-Je Assez Bien Pour Toi… I’m also author of unpublished novels in French (Cierge Noir, Plus Violent Que L’amour, Les Fruits De La Tempête…). My first published novel; THE LAST GHOST/Son Of Struggle got published in 2013 by AuthorhouseUK; it appeared in the LOS Angeles Times Festival Of Books Catalogue 2014 Page 8. Available online @ Amazon, Kindle, AuthorhouseUK, Barnes & Noble, Indie. I wrote numerous award winning texts. I am a Book Reviewer and Translator. I am a member of OneAfricanChild since 2013 and Co-Founder of Le Salon Du Livre Yaounde-Cameroon. You can check my works on: authorrayndebi.wordpress.com.Ray Ndebi on Facebook, @RTNdebi on Twitter, Facebook Page My Soul & Mon Ame.

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