Strange Fall Fruit
Children playing before and / parents within suburban homes / know not or speak not of history, / but just add more candy to the dish / more laughter at the hanging ghosts.
Best of the Net Nominations 2023
Announcing the Decolonial Passage Best of the Net nominees for 2023!
You Almost Cursed God
Because God — the most wise, most just — painted you Black. You are in need, / Like someone suffering from hyperglycemia, of insulins concocted with fierce reasons to live
On Learning That Malcolm X, as a Young Man, Cased and Robbed the Home of My Relative in a Boston Suburb
and what are possessions anyway / when his father died crushed by a streetcar / and he was convinced the Klan was involved / somehow
Number Ninety-Four
Where is he? The man? Her one true love? He asks her to pick him up from this very bus stop — the last bus at 94. She wears a pink, floral sari which wraps around her young, smooth body. The bus never comes.
Finding Home
Before we became the songs we had refused to hear / Before our blossoms became the diaspora dance, now alien to us / Before our souls finally leave the home we carry
Dear Editor,
I’m wondering if you ever reflect on your social position, function, and corresponding / duty? I do. I reflect on it all the time, here on the other side of your opinions, / peckings, and ideas.
Kayla’s Day
Pa doesn’t want to hear about the shooting, and he doesn’t want to talk about Nilah. And I’m scared.
A Lullaby for Home
The floating white fire in the night sky dims / An outline looms, is golden-hewn / Across the crag, beyond the clouds / Our home seen in the horizon
just another foreigner
mandarin in the metro station / spanish when grandma calls / que inteligente son mis chinitos / american when my british friends / call it football / i stop calling it soccer, too
Zain
Would Zain tell him everything about his life? About his boyfriend Tarun, who was half Jamaican and half Indian and cooked him a meal every evening?
Mushrooms in Mint or, On love (Ixix)
mushrooms that first appeared / in my mint patch day after you passed / orange on green yesterday / white on green today
The Butterfly Harvesters
Run by and for White expatriates, the admissions practice at Brethren meant no colour bar impeded wealthy Nigerian locals and rare hybrids.
Netherland: A Prequel to Joseph O’Neill’s Tale
I had studied in the U.S. for my undergraduate and master’s degrees and just returned to the country, so this level of open racism was shocking to me. I felt like I was back in colonial times.
the Decolonial Passage 