BBL—Body Borrowed for Likes

They all look alike now—women carved from the same cartoon,hips like overstretched commas,backsides inflated like National Assembly’s budgets. BBL, they chant.Brazilian Body Lottery.A ritual, not for the faint-hearted—or the flat-bottomed. In this temple of silicone saints,the entry fee is your natural self.You trade it for a gourd-shaped gospel,where “natural” is a slur,and “authentic” is a sin. They line up…

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She Said She Was Just Passing

I used to laugh when movies said love can make a woman lose her mind.I called it fiction, flowers, and foolish scripts.But I watched it unfold, real and raw, on my guy’s streetLike a slow-burning drama shot with no director, no pause button. It began with long walks that had no destination.She’d leave her house in the evening—no bag,…

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Belly-Flyer

(For Chief Barrister Feni Keni KoyundeSleep with anyone and get pregnant) Oh Great Ones!Call your children to the square!Let the drums speakTum! Tum! Tum!I have a story to sing!A tale of a man with wings of wax,who flies wherever the aroma of stew rises! Wait—Have you not seen him?The man of many tongues!Today, he is the crocodile of justice!Tomorrow,…

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The Women Between

The man with a dove in his chestwalks softly through the village breezebut in his compound,his wife tears thunder from cotton clouds,cooks insults in the pot of peace,and scolds the mortar for being quiet. He offers laughter,she stirs storms.He plants kindness,she harvests thorns.And the town calls him “weak”as termites eat his roofwhile he prays for rain. But the man…

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Forward’s not always progress

He rose,without the gilded luck of throne-born sons,but with the raw hunger of a man who knewthe iron tang of turned soil.His fingers carved roads from gravel and ghost,watched the land kneel—an old houndlicking its master’s palm.He shouldered mountains,their roots snarling at his feet,and with each cracked nail,he wrote the futurein a languageonly storms could speak. Forward!He moved like…

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The Arsonist’s Lullaby

IIn the house of sighs, she lit the wick—moon-eyed, hush-hymned,cloaked in crêpe of cope(a shroud she stitched herself).A bonfire of silk apologies,kindled by her matchstick sorrow. When the roof spat soot and grief,she danced among ashes—chanting trauma-trauma like tambourine,a dirge of didn’t-mean-to—while the neighbors wept in buckets,their tears slick fuel for her next performance. IISaid she:“I suffer from kaleidopsyche,the…

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A Market

The land is a market, but who owns the stall? The traders have vanished, but the thieves stand tall. They sell the rain, they sell the road, they sell the trees where ancestors strode. They sell the fire, they sell the clay, they sell the dawn before it turns to day. And the young? They flee like startled birds,…

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But still, they dance

(for the city that devours its own) In the court of the one-eyed king, the scribes bend their spines like wilted reeds, etching lies in the wind. Who will count the stolen moons? Who will measure the grain of the enpoored spilled beneath gold-tipped boots? The horn is cracked, the drum chokes on silence, and the river no longer…

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…a sieve

They stand at the grave, these men with fat stomachs, these men who once spat on his name, now singing praises with trembling lips! They beat the drums—boom, boom, boom— calling him the great one, the one who walked with the ancestors, the one who never stumbled! Oh, my people! Where was this greatness when he walked barefoot in…

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Truth kneels…

And the gong beats thrice, for the one who walks beyond the river. Once, he was shadow, Once, he was storm— but now, a hymn in the mouth of mourners, a carved mask of old proverbs. The scribes gather at the crossroads, sifting dust, refining echoes, the past laid out like palm fronds, stripped of the wormwood and the…

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