New Semantic Entries in the Age of Floods
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New Semantic Entries in the Age of Floods
- New Semantic Entries in the Age of Floods
BOAT: (Noun) A major means of transportation.
BUS: (Noun) A large vehicle that can run on land and float on water, with suspendable tyres
CAR: (Noun) [Archaic]: Former means of transportation.
FARMLAND (Noun): A vast, natural swimming pool often used for canoeing and water polo and sometimes mistaken for road, especially in Nigeria and parts of West Africa.
Government (Noun): A system of control by a group of officials who issue completion certificates for non-existent drainage and embankment jobs.
Government official: 1. An official who connives with others of his kind to divert public funds meant for water control into his private pockets.
2. An official at loggerheads with meteorologists, especially one who pays lip service to flood control issues.
Hospital: (Noun) A workplace for fleeing doctors and nursed overwhelmed by floods.
Hospitalise (verb). Take (someone) to a place from which doctors have fled because of floods.
IDP: (Noun and adj.) 1. People fleeing flooding and who are used for photo ops by government officials, or as collateral for external loans 2. (Linguistics) Abbreviation for In-Dependent Proof of the origin of the code-mixing in tropical Africa and Asia. 3. People who resist sexual predators who have come to exploit their vulnerabilities.
IDP Camp: (Noun) A make-shift camp without water and sanitation often touted as proof that governments are caring for their distressed citizens.
ROAD: (Noun): Right of way of furious floods that have already overcome the resistance of patriotic forests, and sometimes referred to as ‘river’.
RIVER: See ROAD above.
ROOFTOP: (Noun):
1. An imaginary object protruding from deep waters, filmed by pilots of flying saucers.
2. A pointed or prism-shaped object protruding out of the ocean, which according to some theories, once formed part of human habitation.
– Lexicographed by Anaele Ihuoma
Another day is Burn
What song would she have sung today – who knows!
Cold, From Putin’s Winter
COLD, FROM PUTIN’S WINTER
- I –
Five kittens and a mother
A stray puppy, without one
A grieving german shepherd’s head gropes
for the hand that would give it a rub
but encounters empty seats,
with expelled shells from the raining
artillery. And milk teeth prematurely harvested.
The house is cold, from Putin’s winter
leaving spring guns
set to fire by the merest foreshadow of the incoming season
A videoman, from a far country
Drops his head, before his camera’s hard case
His own eyes cannot take in what his camera lens is gobbling up:
A dessert of brown brains
After an appetiser of red soups scooped with blackening craniums.
Fingers are frozen, on aperture control:
Hearts are melted
by the glassy eye of the german shepherd still crying for a rub.
Ten minutes ago, he was in breastland
in the Milkyway of her mama’s mammary kindness
now she is…
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surprised?
I may not have received millions, but I have received surprises.
Every now and then a small ‘evidence of sales’ drops in. Who from? NARRATIVE LANDSCAPE, publishers of IMMINENT RIVER. So refreshing to know that in a country of Hush!!!puppis and HAbba! Gana’s we have some level headed folks who believe in doing business the right way (If I say ‘the good old way’ I may be misunderstood because these guys are – beyond cutting edge).
Thank you, folks. And ‘may your ships sail the course of wider waters, [apologies Ifeanyi Menkiti?] .
Pray, what do people see in IMMINENT RIVER that keeps them buying? Mind you, I am not complaining!
Gracias.
65Albert Otto, Uzor Maxim Uzoatu and 63 others
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Cold, From Putin’s Winter
Cold, From Putin’s Winter
COLD, FROM PUTIN’S WINTER
- I –
Five kittens and a mother
A stray puppy, without one
A grieving german shepherd’s head gropes
for the hand that would give it a rub
but encounters empty seats,
with expelled shells from the raining
artillery. And milk teeth prematurely harvested.
The house is cold, from Putin’s winter
leaving spring guns
set to fire by the merest foreshadow of the incoming season
A videoman, from a far country
Drops his head, before his camera’s hard case
His own eyes cannot take in what his camera lens is gobbling up:
A dessert of brown brains
After an appetiser of red soups scooped with blackening craniums.
Fingers are frozen, on aperture control:
Hearts are melted
by the glassy eye of the german shepherd still crying for a rub.
Ten minutes ago, he was in breastland
in the Milkyway of her mama’s mammary kindness
now she is clutching at hanging nipples
as mama’s head bows to the demonic accuracy of KalashnikovNIKS
soon it will be Sorochinskaya festival, and
there will be nothing for little Anna to to feed her eyes on
much less, her stomach
until her mother can, once again
scramble Ukrainian cooking utensils
and get her giggling again –
in another life
The house is cold, from Putin’s winter
- II –
Here, the town planner for the surrogate czar
With a taste for boulevards where Z tanks worship
the god of haste
This town used to have a little
corner where the dead could find
A resting place
But now, even the new capital city – Cemeterygrad
Overflowing with half- interred corpses
Can hardly find space for the conquerors’ carrion
And their casks of cigarette butts…
Parks are bulldozed
for graveyards
and monuments erected with caked remains
of baby cereals
frozen by angry snows
as broken skulls mount a parade of honour
where the despot’s arm is frozen in mid-salute
by cramps of retribution
But Putin’s new sepulchres
Cannot tame our love for Russia
We were borne on the wings of the seagull
Where Chekhov’s gun is more than a play-thing for playwrights
Across the world, children run home for the aroma of mushrooms soups
But here in Ukraine it is the cremation dust of parents gone home in plumes
The house is cold, from Putin’s Winter
A Snap Review of African Contemporary Literature
A Snap Review of African Contemporary Literature
First, an Online Literary Experience,
Then Coming to a Bookshop Near You
Samplers:
“These are not just people possessed by poesy. These are people pummelled by pain – people who wield the pen to make plain their plaints. People who thought they had escaped the pangs of misrule only to find themselves ensnared by their own vote, (or election ‘mine-thods’), and plunged seemingly irretrievably into the abyss of anomy. A country littered with spires and minarets, of general overseers and imams, but where vice is the unchallenged viceroy”. From Review of Wellington Nwogu’s The Yawning Earth..;
“The author, it seems, was never at the mercy of her narrative; she had it dance to her whims … That is why she can hardly plead mitigation if charged with enticement. She makes Ifemelu, a normal but strong-willed youth, morph into a universal nymphomaniac, meddling with marriages and trifling with friendships.” From review of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah……………………………………….”””””””””””’
“This may not be the masterpiece that Cole is demonstrably capable of, but in adopting the book’s opening salvos and sustaining the trend to the final full stop, he has given the lie to the imperious diktat of modern day Pontifices maximi of world poetics who are wont to decree a start-up template for fiction. Now I know how all those literary prescriptions for the opening page should be taken: jauntily to the trash can. Art, for it to be art, need not follow a pre-script…” From Review of Teju Cole’s Open City.
“This may not be the masterpiece that Cole is demonstrably capable of, but in adopting the book’s opening salvos and sustaining the trend to the final full stop, he has given the lie to the imperious diktat of modern day Pontifices maximi of world poetics who are wont to decree a start-up template for fiction. Now I know how all those literary prescriptions for the opening page should be taken: jauntily to the trash can. Art, for it to be art, need not follow a pre-script”
aihuomaimminentriver 