Published in Spring 2024 Online Folio
Over cold cola and Jollof, my new best friend, a handsome Fula in my dorm, remembers back
home
a plane set ablaze from faulty machinery.
Too cheap, he had chosen the bus and missed the inferno. A classmate
burned to bone.
At the embassy window, my number called,
dice
cast against bullet-proof pane.
Congratulations
the consul officer says, beaming from his carefully
considered act of benevolence.
My crossed fingers exhaled, woozy –
I know to feel sorry for the family behind me. The baby, plump as mangoes, coos
pulls her father’s hat down his face.
He returns it to its first
position
My friend opens the blinds then refills my drink. Memory thins in the half-eaten night. Thrums
only when it shouldn’t: graduation. first apartment. first raise.
In our cups of sweet carbon
atoms are wide awake, numbered, disorderly
we dissolve
un
seen
laced with guilt
This piece is from our Spring 2024 African Writing Online Folio, an online-exclusive extension of our special issue, “African Writing: A Partial Cartography of Provocations,” guest edited by Chris Abani. You can read more from our Spring 2024 issue, available for purchase in print and digital forms here.
Liz Femi is a Nigerian American writer, actor, and NAACP Theater Award Nominee for her solo play, Take Me to the Poorhouse. A recipient of Writeability’s Right to Write Award, she has work published in Good River Review, Wild Roof Journal, Stone Poetry Quarterly, Two Thirds North, West Trade Review, and elsewhere. She is based in Los Angeles and Atlanta and is a 2024 Pushcart winner.
