Abdulrazaq Salihu
Exile
Outside home, the night
Is shivering.
A star is singing a path
Into everything once void, once lifeless.
A cricket and a bush,
Each eating into the other.
The graveyard wears a satin face
And its grown grasses collect water to themselves.
The road that made for me this path
Didn't tell me I would die at the end.
Outside home, the forest
Is yearning to sing names
Of boys drowned into exile.
Back to Issue X…
Abdulrazaq Salihu is a Nigerian writer and member of the Hilltop Creative Arts Foundation. He has his works published/forthcoming in Brittle Paper, Masks Literary Magazine, Angime, Better Than Starbucks, The Pine Cone Review, Jupiter Review, and elsewhere. He won the 2022 Masks Literary Magazine Poetry Award, the Poetry Archive Poetry Contest (2022), a BPKW Poetry Contest, the Nigeria Prize for Teen Authors, and others. He tweets @Arazaqsalihu.
