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 […]

“I asked the two if they knew where Okot p’Bitek’s grave was. They didn’t, and neither did they know who that was…”

One Sunday evening in 2010, I was at the dinner table, set up with my phone and earphones, indulging in my end-of-week ritual: listening to the classical music show on Capital FM from 9 to […]

i’ve watched leaves raining down from their mother tree,
yours was a droplet of salt on our wounds.

In a Nebraska grocery store, packets of corn yellow 
at me from the shelves and I’m back to the planting  
season, when the rains have appeased the land.

everything I am 
is wanting & needing/

every bone, every 
hollow, this image/

is a god fashion-made for you/

But you can see me there.
In the picture of the birds. 
In the church of avian beings. 
Small, colorful, and endangered.

Chronic—A Chapbook on Living with Illness, edited by Yvonne Wabai There’s a certain silence that often settles around chronic illness—a quiet that comes not just from pain, but from being disbelieved, misdiagnosed, or forgotten; a […]