 The winner of September giveaway is Esohe Iyare This giveaway is courtesy of SprinNG and Roving Heights Bookstore.
Instruction: Read the publications on the SprinNG website for the month and write a comment on 2 or more of the publications. Add your name and email address when filling in the comment box (email addresses will not be made public). We encourage that your comment meets at least 2 of these goals: 1. Invite another reader into the world of beauty you have seen in a work. 2. Provide a very brief summary of what you read. 3. Give your interpretation/perspective of what has been written. 4. Provide suggestions for improvement. The SprinNG team will evaluate the comments and select the winner of the bookstore gift card at the end of the month. Comment on the poems, book reviews, articles, interviews, and guest posts.
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By Muhammed Olowonjoyin  I’m in a universe, trying to milk crumbs
Of dying things from my body. To love this Place of haunting mistakes. To trust that my Body is my body. In this dream, I’m traipsing out Of a garden of agaves into the city Of fluorescence. My body paints Itself black because boys like me are Formed by prisms that refract lights our Bodies will never glow. By Ilerioluwa Olatunde  "She had never been able to shake the sense that life was war, a series of battles with the occasional spell of good things."
In A Spell of Good Things, Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ masterfully reveals the harsh realities of class inequality by infusing her life experiences into the narrative. Inspired by her upbringing in Nigeria, she vividly captures the stark contrast between her privileged origins as the daughter of a medical doctor and the eye-opening encounter with an improvised neighborhood during a detour on her way home from work in Ilé-Ifẹ̀, as she revealed in a recent interview with The Guardian. This personal experience gave her a setting for one strand of her novel. After reading her debut novel, Stay with Me, I have always appreciated Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ as a writer. While Stay with Me delved into the personal struggles of a young couple who face the pressure of infertility and the weight of tradition, A Spell of Good Things explores the complexities of human relationships within a broader context of social and political turmoil. By Olalekan Daniel Kehinde  Tonight, nightingales harvest bullets like dead melodies
plucked from requiems running in cleft mouths. The moon drinks a cupful of souls & belches ruined beams on festering bodies. There is a cloak in the shape of darkness rechristening us at the altar of our own blood, resting our bones on earth's fur — the dark's a reaver, river of ribcages. By Sarah Eno Obongha  On Saturday, the sky had dimmed its light, and the weather had become cooler than earlier. The loud, offensive, and uneven sounds from the butcher rooms had reduced, but the locker room came alive because those for both the afternoon shift and night shift were conversing about the absence of light, which lasted for about 7 hours the previous day, and how it affected the storage of their company’s meat. Anthony joined in the conversation a little. He said he closed quite late before the power returned, and the bodies of the ram in the ram's room were beginning to smell. He added that a wall was leaking in the goat's room, and he suspects that a freezer had gone bad upstairs, and the meat in it had defrosted. Anthony told Joshua, his closest friend at work, that he came in earlier than usual because he wanted to leave early back home to attend his nephew’s birthday.
“Your nephew is about nine years old. Why would his birthday be celebrated at night?” Joshua asked, “It's the weekend, and it’s our family's tradition to have a celebration with everyone around; you know we still stay together in our grandfather’s house,” Anthony responded. “That’s true, meaning say, if you marry, you, your wife, and children go stay there too?” “Yes, that’s before we start having children. I wouldn’t want to be there with my entire family, as long as there are enough rooms for us and our family. I think I have stayed there long enough.” “I envy the fact that you don’t pay rent.” “And I envy the fact that you have your privacy.” By Moshkur Ajikobi  Hitherto,
I had wanted to paint a self-portrait of euphoria in the hands of its seeker, but this one, too, dragged & locked me inside my room. Therein, my faulty fan heard my incoherent soliloquy. When it stopped fanning, I knew, someday, it'd find another means of serving me. |