EDITOR'S NOTE

I look outside my window today, and notice hues of characters and figures taking shape— objects morphing into brilliance, all at once. The admixture of these objects coming together to create seamless ideas is what  informs this issue as an organic whole. Issue two is hinged on the notion of impermanence and the ineluctable power of transformation. As we will come to see in each genre, the poems, stories and playlet curated for this issue not only sheds more light on the adumbrated stance of transformation in human life, it does so by eliciting a feeling of pathos and empathy because we have all been there. That moment when we feel most vulnerable because because we think we are changing. When in actual reality this is normal. Dovetailing this is Borges, who says: “We are our memory…that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors.”

Transformation does not occur in a vacuum. It goes through a long process of silence and quality amount of time. No work better elucidates this than the poem "Silence" by Fasasi Abdulrosheed Oladipupo, a deft written piece whose power resides not only in the cadence of language, but also the opening lines, which incites a memory akin to the growth:  "I brew silence in my throat, somewhere, some day/ I shall tell this story, a cleric shearing off my boyhood..." Fasasi's use of the word "shearing" points to the stripping of an identity. An image.

 Now, we may ask, what nexus does time share with transformation? Or how does affect anything at all? I have always wondered how something as simple and complex as time controlled man and his activities. Time, is one thing a man is obsequiously submissive to. Inasmuch as he try to bend the rules; inasmuch as he tries to shift the paradigm in a world bounded by rules; inasmuch as he tries to be deviant or recalcitrant, time still calls him home. One may ask, could this be one out of numerous reasons Ocean Vuong referred to time as a mother? Time still ends up calling the lost and unruly home. I have seen this unconscious dissatisfaction with time play out in various cases; a robber breaks the law by tweaking the very core which holds the existence of possession. Something which binds the vassals to their suzerains during medieval times. In his book, The Man Who Lived Underground, Richard Wright fleshes out this pervasiveness of time through an x-ray of the thought of the main character (Fred Daniels) where he says:

"He held the watches and heard their awful ticking and he hated them; these watches were measuring time, making men tense and taut with the sense of passing hours, telling tales of death, crowning time the king of consciousness."

From this excerpt, we see that time is alluded "king of consciousness." This is the same way time revs and sets objects and characters in motion of transformation. This is better explained through the poignantly written fiction of DC Diamondopolous, entitled "Slapstick Blues," where we see the character of Lila Mae, a black lady who witnesses tortuous dispositions from white folks around her, due to her unfathomable colour. After the death of her boyfriend, Henry, by the Whites, Lila Mae hatches hate and anger towards to Whites in her heart; later on (through the course of time taking it's effect) we see that Lila Mae becomes transformed in her thoughts and disposition towards to White and their idiosyncrasies as she tries to become one of them.

This issue cuts across different themes and sub-themes. As literature continues to blossom, so also does the issues it hopes to interrogates. This issue, and it's contributors, can be described as daring, animated and dramatic. As always, we continue in that tradition of curating poetry, fiction, non-fiction and art forms from all over the world.

Welcome to issue two.

Prosper Ifeanyi.