Contains strong language if i say i am a woman             will you take an ice-pick to my tongue & climb inside             my mouth & sculpt the word in your image? if i cry out equality in my sleep             the word too bright to see in daytime anymore             will you ask me to […]

my hands were soft until you tried to hold them. blue skies. no marble horizons. stone was not stone but skin. i knew how to bruise  knew imperfection knew no grams/kilograms/tonnes or how to stand without making the ceiling sway. traced my own lifelines. my hands were soft under the sculptor’s tools. not clay, but […]

Ayomide, yes, I speak to you. Never in your nimble mind ever stare into the hollow thing in the middle of another man’s eye when he calls you by anything other than your first name. Yes, I speak to you, In the cynical instance where the efforts, where the lights in the sky of our […]

“and he said, let her be burned” when her fingers wore the jewels of the kedeshah her face wore a veil; the man touched her but could not see beyond her eyes in which desert sands glittered for miles. there was enough in her veiled face to tell of that knowledge: how ripe fruit tastes […]

Three children, a gas bill of £300, even with a heater permanently turned off – praying away the cold in the winter months – but I will always fight for the right to be myself, light to shine on me. Alone as I lounge in the tub, moss growing on the ceiling as I stare […]

I could not be a mother in America. I could not send my hypothetical little lad off with a face soft as butter, a camo backpack strapped to his sweet shoulders, and eyes that are mine without the shadows to school. I could not send my made-up boy to school in America. I could not […]