into the light, steps what was known to come—all they built
in the name of living, erased
from the face of the world.
my years of trudging through
piles of folktales to return to our
roots, ripped by archeologists’
declaration of death sweeping
its hands over our line of descent.

a journey ordained to be a reawakening of our disappearing
cultures lie dead like a paintbrush
crushed by the foot of an easel.
down the drain goes my people’s
crowns of cowries. when the hour
arrives, my hands will not be my
hands when they rip sheepskins
off the muzzles of drums. When
they yank the image of Kwali off
the naira note. when they beg
dentists to floss debris of my mother
tongue out of my tribeless mouth.

an ancestry built on a backbone of water, upon its death, they
tell me, is thrown back into the
water. the griots must pour their
fables back into their throats.
their story is no longer a story.
there’s no one left to believe they
lived as custodians of crocodiles.
while they slept in round mud
houses, the universe shifted its
gaze away from the tales of men
whose bloodline began on hilltops.

when the world’s mind crumbles, no one will remember Gbagyi women
carving life into calabashes.
no child will know about the ghosts
of lost lands trapped in a city
built on the graves of my ancestors.
ask me where i come from & my
fingers will start searching for a
village missing in a google map
blotted by the ink of
my computer’s broken screen

Notes: It is primarily concerned with the origins, cultures, and traditions of the Gbagyi people of Northern Nigeria, offering new ways of seeing our past, history and current state. The poem grapples with the themes of cultural continuity and evolution, trans-generational differences and transition, highlighting the gradual transformation we have experienced as a people over the years, especially the forceful expulsion and displacement of our forefathers from Abuja by the Nigerian government in the late 1970s, their (our) ancestral land for it to be developed into the capital city of Nigeria. An expulsion whose wounds still haunts us till today. An expulsion that forced many of us to become residents of lands on different parts of the country where we do not necessarily feel culturally at home. With the expulsion came repercussions our ethnic group wasn’t prepared for. Over the years, our native language has become more at risk of suffering from extinction, an ending in itself, as our people found themselves in communities where our language was a minority and thus, had to learn the more widely spoken languages to ensure our survival. My hope with this poem is not only to dig into our past but to also document and preserve our cultural practices that have long faded even amongst our current generation.

Bio: Abu Bakr Sadiq is the author of Leaked Footages (University of Nebraska Press, 2024), which won the 2023 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets. 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, and elsewhere. 

Listening to Mozart’s Adagio, Divertimento in E-flat major, II. for violin, viola, and cello
in South Carolina, USA, on the 25th of May, 2020

Hardly a diversion, this business
of breathing, this fourth limb, in
-spiration in every sense

and this exposed,
every decision counts.
But this system is oxygen-

rich, inhalations as big
as the ocean, gulping
octave leaps, sips

and sighs through rolled
tongues, expirations
so extended

they pierce the sun.
Here, three lungs, each
primus inter pares

pass motif and melody
in a pranayama
of parasympathy

as one breathes out,
another in,
their supply each other

each exhale
not a sacrifice
but a loan of the next breath.

Notes:
A tipping point loomed the morning of 25 May, 2020, with mounting COVID deaths and fears of nexts, and each other.  I was consumed with guilt for not having been with my father as he died during lockdown, my absence a complete aberration, however involuntary, of familial bonds and my love for him.  The morning sun belied intimations of a personal and global spiral as I tended to my mother, swallowing my own grief, while tracking daily death tolls, the globe’s macabre shared experience.  Meanwhile, many Americans where I live defended a notion of “freedom” that signaled a suicidal collapse of social cohesion. 

Then screens lit up with a 9 minute and 29-second act of barbarism, part of a brutal historical pattern but newly available on video for witness.   I began to pen the poem “Breath Taking” as I listened to Mozart and wondered what the day’s bitter collision of ends might portend for afters, for next breaths. 

Bio
Susanna Schantz is a former teacher for New York City Board of Education special programs for pregnant, parenting and unhoused teens, and for young men in the justice system, U.S. Department of Education TRIO programs, and the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities, with degrees from Yale and Columbia Universities.  Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Deceleration, Jerry Jazz Musician, La PicciolettaBarca, Syncopation Literary Journal, The Calendula Review, and VAN Magazine of music (Berlin).  A trained naturalist, and the daughter of two musicians, she lives in South Carolina, and holds dual US/Irish citizenship. 

could we be deaf
swamped by the silence
we once craved
now that the ache of blare
and dread has numbed

the shell we held against our ear
has blown to nothing but
an itch of sound
a tinnitus to niggle
long after the source is dumb

it gurgles through tar
bobbing and burping
like a dyspeptic hog
to vex the brain
with persistent riffs
of all that passed
and endless chances missed

dust hovers and lands
a canopy of grey
lagging features
with despair
nothing feels right
rudderless
in free fall
nothing salvageable

vestigial drone
once savaged hope
now burrs in mockery
remembered but blanked out
or that’s the aim
might be the thrum
of remnant grit
tenacious

at least there’s something left                   
to fret the pearl                 
a stub of life
goading us toward 
whatever peace might come                     

if death’s not finished with us yet

Notes:
My original idea for this poem came after the start of Covid, before a vaccine had been developed.  It was by no means certain that there would be a positive outcome for mankind.  I imagined a time when the virus had largely burned itself out, along with huge swathes of populations, and we were left with an eerie stillness, unsure of how to proceed after all the directions, destruction and panic.

Notes
The poem still feels relevant today with recent televised scenes of silent devastation after the ceasefire in Gaza, for example, or in the wake of disastrous storms and floods across the world, caused in part by global warming.  The sense that when the ‘music’ of war or catastrophe stops, there is still the memory of noise that lingers to reproach, threaten, harry, worry.  However, the fact that ‘tinnitus’, an indomitable spirit, exists means there is life, movement and scope to progress, unless hope itself finally becomes irrecoverable.

Bio
The Yorkshire-born former teacher now lives in Nottinghamshire.  She has won the Red Shed, Penfro, Walter Swan and Culture Matters Competitions.  Her poems have been published in various anthologies and online.  She recently completed a Creative Writing MA in York and continues to attend regular poetry and writing groups and to review contemporary fiction before publication.