i want to make a ritual of washing my face, i want to appease my peopled when i say i am a thing/ it is gentleness/ when i say i am a thing that does […]

What do you know? I tell my friend I didn’t apply for a scholarship because I knew I’d be sick around that time. She tilts her head. “How would you know you’d be sick?”To her, […]

Today, the pain wears pearls, sits politely between my ribs. I dress her in cardigans and loose language: “I’m just a little tired.” No one asks tired how it learned to limp. At the pharmacy, […]

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 […]

[UN]detected Motion On good days, I move like anyone else (they assume) On bad days, I calculate each step like complex options (they never see) Hiding the invisible hunger of my gnawing pain: Take pill […]

An Insider’s Manual To Survival You count your breaths afraid to draw in for too long. This energy is too sacred, one wrong move and you’re buried inside your own body. There must be a […]

My fingers are folded into a fist pried open by prayer – a rose in bloom rupturing like my ovarian cyst. I crush my birth control tablets and pray to God for a better womb […]

Do I accept me and mine as darkness? Perhaps I ought not to. For the generation that comes after us. To convince them as I have had to be convinced that there is so much light, life, in myself – in my kin – to give the world. But what do we keep giving ourselves to and for? Consumption, and consumption, why radiate if it is swallowed whole by the machinations of a coloniser?

I consider radiance to be a state of illumination and purification that culminates from an intense process of refinement. I equate it to the spiritual beautification of one’s being, the way one observes, the manner in which one speaks, listens and engages with the world. To be in a state of radiance is to be in perpetual refinement. Our life experiences in their variations and uniformities, and our choices, whether to resist or endure, become the processes that make us radiant

I sometimes retreat into confusion. In these moments, I forget that I am merely human, a transient being. My own radiance—that inner light—is inevitably dimmed: sometimes by the state of the world, and other times by the storms within my own mind