When we are not in the room listening
To Mama’s teary roar at our father,
Or his ‘I’m sorry’, that punctuates the silence
that follows her sobs, like in the writing of an elementary child,
Or the incessant rattling at the door that has made our room a haunted place, We go to the pond five blocks from our house, sit under the canopy of Udara trees And listen to the croak of frogs till it turns lullaby
The little water is just mud now, and We never caught anything here. Some days, we wonder out loud why mama wants a divorce,
Why she wouldn’t let Marie clean the red splashes that has gathered on the wall that day, Like from the constant dripping of rotten tomatoes.
He had carved his name into it when it was wet with cells,
And it has dried so hard, the blood and his name are now elements of the wall. Today, we’re early because the rattling of things is more frequent and would never stop. You catch a frog and let it go,
You catch a turtle. You want to keep this one,
Turtles don’t breed here.
You are making a new home for it and I ask,
“Where do fishes go when the water dries?”
“To heaven” you say, “And they drop from the sky as soon as the rains come again.”


Ada Michael Nwadike is a Nigerian poet and storyteller. She was shortlisted for the 2016 Nigerian Students Poetry Prize. She was also in the BN poetry longlist in 2015, and she was 3rd prize in poetry for the Muse Prize in the same year. Her works have appeared in praxis magazine, Poets in Nigeria, Type and Cast, quintessential Christian, Arts Lounge, among others. Adaeze is a teacher and peer educator, and she considers teaching the most rewarding of all her activities. She watches football when Radford is playing, and can’t go a day without listening to Jidenna.