the teeth beneath your skin cadge to chew the thumb of your veins; a heartbeat is a bell sound of the apocalypse. you are a cashier of flowers, your palms cajole your stomach to sing the music of bomb blasts. on this soil, the peace is a cadaver of roses. your only way of narrating these stories is by reflecting grief on the face of flames. everything beautiful is jailed. thought, not like a coconut. in search of a tug of war, you blindfold the sky. like a cabbage. like a seed. like a fold of clothes beneath the loin. nothing marches the universe of wildfire like a tongue of stones. it defines apathy in a choking silence; taking fear into the smiles of time & twisting the ashes into the screw. you eyed a drowning boy; he mourns, travelling under the mother's pillow. I tell you, cries voyage in the storm, & life in the cycle of grief. so now tell me, how do you dissolve a question into an answer?
Mubarak Said, a TPC XII, SprinNG & SAF Alumni, is an award-winning Nigerian writer. He stands out as the recipient of the 2023 Bill Ward Prize for Emerging Writers (Prose) and the Threposs Poetry Contest. In 2022, he also achieved recognition as the 3rd runner-up for the Bill Ward Prize for Emerging Writers (Poetry) and received a longlist placement in the Gimba Suleiman Hassan Esq Poetry Prize. Mubarak is an esteemed editor for the African Literary Summit Anthology, a poetry reader for the White Cresset Journal, and a guest contributor for Applied Worldwide in the United States. He holds membership in both the Jewel Literary and Creativity Foundation and the Hilltop Creative Arts Foundation. His literary contributions have graced numerous literary journals, including Brittle Paper, Kalahari Review, Spillwords, and more.
