Mbanefo Chibuike is a native storyteller and poet who graduated from the Federal University of Technology Owerri with First Class Honours. Most of his work centers on darkness, sexuality, and death. His story Desolate Room which explored sickle cell anemia in the prehistoric Nigerian family, was published in Dwarts Magazine of African and Mainstream Literature Issue 6. His short story titled Burying Memories recently was longlisted in the 2018 K & L Prize for African Literature.

​To heal from these things he cannot name, he began to live them in poems. His poem Eleven Forms of Death was shortlisted for the 2018 Creative Freelance Writerz Biannual Literary Award. The same year, he appeared in multiple shortlists such as the Christopher Okigbo Poetry Prize, Eriata Oribhabor Poetry Prize, Poets in Nigeria Food Poetry Contest, Great African Poets Award, Samson Abanni Poetry Contest for his poems Man in the wind, Stripping a river its name, A Lagos of burnt boys, My father's burial through his body and Be home to our memories.

Chibuike hopes for the blessings of writing stories and poems that dispossess and malign people. Some of his other works have appeared in Kalahari Review, Brittle Paper, OkadaBooks, Creative Freelance Writerz magazines, Poets in Nigeria Journals, and other online platforms.

Your body is a house of god. Or a collection of boys.
By Mbanefo Chibuike
​
& you were twelve when a boy first called you baby -
& you ran into the eye of the night. Your body learns
how to hold names on Fridays and whip them into
the confession box two days later. Your body wishes
coyness isn't flirtatious - how a house of god is a good girl
& a bad girl is a collection of boys. But Handel's Hallelujah
is a god’s song you hum before giving a lover this body.
The first time you picked pieces of your heart, ducking
on your tears, your fingers wandered towards your vulva
& you watched the emptiness fill you. Mother could be right -

​Spanning across four decades, Cheluchi Onyemelukwe-Onuobia’s debut novel, The Son of the House, is a compact tale of two women of different ages and opposite social class. Nwabulu, a fifty-something-year-old fashion designer, who spent her early years serving as a housemaid is kidnapped in the company of Julie, the septuagenarian, who has lived a life of glamour. They exchange stories to while away time, and there, Julie comes clean about the gravest deceit of her adult life leading to the realization that they have, in the past or present, held strange comforts for each other’s aches.

Graffitis
By Mbanefo Chibuike

again. & again
everything broken heals
as a reminder of scents left behind.
the night is held in fragments of prayers
& this is how darkness falls off your mouth
your unfurled tongue knowing the taste of tequilas
& the language of grief is a boy emptying himself into you
your fragile body is a lean canvas where he tries to paint Christ
just before an angry mob resurrects on his bare skin.
your arms are not wide enough to hold photographs
of city walls defaced by the ghosts of your lover -
denial eases grief, here's what it means to love
to return & live in the skin of another boy -
darkness teaches the night holders
to become inscriptions.
 
Read More about the Author Here - www.nigerianwriters.info/mbanefo-chibuike

Be Home to Our Memories
By Mbanefo Chibuike

The morning we decided to leave home
you spoke the language of the legs,
turning our bodies into the ravenous night -
from watching the sun rise into mother's face
to our eyes feeding off the lush vegetation.
You fold our memories into this emptiness
my mother's hands -
in us, you paint a picture of sojourners
whose shadows remain erased in the sun -
and you this mournful recollection
stranding our new beginnings between trees.