I want to cut right through to the word house. It is opaque. It ends at the Indo-European root kus, which is of uncertain meaning but is related to ku and sku, which both mean to cover, to conceal, from which we have skin and hide. I am reminded of the color of my skin, its opacity, and my mind wanders.

He is curled on the floor with his back facing the viewer. On the sheet-metal garage door before him, ‘no parking’ is written in caps. A few feet away from his head is a cage-like […]

At the Gates My mother’s spirit is everywhere, and I am a coward who has run away from home in the name of healing. I have left my father with the loneliness of the giant […]

This chapbook was born out of a desire to give voice to something many of us go through, but few get to talk about: the silence surrounding chronic illness and disability.

The Boy Who Couldn’t Catch the WordsOur histories cling to us. We are shaped by where we come from.—Chimamanda Ngozi AdichieI remember trying to read like trying to hold water with my bare hands. The […]

In this tenth edition of A Long Talk, Liberian poet Jeremy Teddy Karn is in conversation with Ghanaian poet Henneh Kyereh Kwaku. This conversation begins with an depth look on each writer and their relation […]

In this ninth edition of A Long Talk, Nigerian poets Abu Bakr Sadiq and Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto have a deeply profound conversation that touches on life in Nigeria, the present (and future) implications of studying and […]

Zukiswa Wanner is a critically acclaimed South African journalist, novelist and editor who recently released her fifth novel Love, Marry, Kill with South African publisher Kwela. For this seventh edition of A Short Talk, 2025 […]

I have been thinking recently about how once a story, poem, essay (whatever container holds it) exists in the world, the storyteller no longer holds the pen. The readers bring so much of themselves to the page that when they finish, they leave with a completely different experience from the writer, and even every other reader. I love that

Ani Kayode Somtochukwu is a writer and queer liberation activist whose work is a luminous refusal of silence. His debut novel, And Then He Sang a Lullaby, dares to imagine queer love in a world […]