Poetry
Wet Dollars
Money rituals are inhumane practices carried out by different traditional religions in Nigeria. They, unfortunately, contribute to and are influenced by the kidnapping problem in the country.
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Poetry
Poetry
Exorcism
In many ways, this poem is about an excruciatingly difficult childhood, but it is also about my found family, about the people who have helped me realize that the past is something you can leave behind, that you can exorcise, put away because there are better things to do than stay haunted by the dark.
Poetry
Old Brooklyn Magic
I wanted to paint an eerie portrait of the Brooklyn Bridge area as I first experienced it, capturing both a feeling of wonder and unease, for any place with enough character and history can feel like it has an undercurrent of old magic that may ensnare you.
Poetry
Touch This Cancer, It Probably Won’t Bite
This piece comes from a childhood of taking piano lessons. I switched to other instruments after high school, but I still remember how to read sheet music.
Poetry
in your mind, they still dance
What is storytelling if not our duty to necromancy? Our duty to bring life to ashes? This poem was largely inspired by society’s response to The Dancing Plague of 1518, a notable instance of the virus-like phenomenon of people frantically dancing themselves to collapse and even death. To this day, no one knows what caused these outbreaks, yet, centuries later, its nebulous and horrific occurrence continues to call scholars and artists to reanimate history into a mirror of the present.
Poetry
Annihilation of Red
I’d originally planned on writing a nightmarish short story, but it turned out better as a poem. It also became a way for me to explore grief and the loss of a loved one while attempting to deliver a more surreal and cinematic reading experience overall.
Poetry
Mnemonic Burning
As someone who has had many family members lose their memory to disease, I wanted to write a poem where there isn’t exactly hope, but at least autonomy in memory loss—that instead of walking down a dimming path where you eventually lose your way home, it could be more like an act of burning your own memories to light the way to a different future.
Poetry
Sumbisori
“Sumbisori” refers to the peculiar exhale of the haenyeo-women divers in the Jeju Province of South Korea. When they surface, they let their breath out as a whistling sound that has always struck me as both a little eerie and a little lonely.
Poetry
Possession
This poem was born after a strange empathy opened my eyes to Matthew 12:43-45—the Bible passage where Jesus teaches about demons wandering in the wilderness after a demon-possessed man is healed. Here, I tried to capture the persona’s body as a living space.
Poetry
A Long Time Afterward
This one is a ghost poem whose subject was only ever alive on film: Johnny Ryan, played stone cold and queer to the bone by Wendell Corey in the deliriously Technicolor noir Desert Fury (1947). He haunts the end of the film and kept on haunting me past it.
