by Noma Amadi (they/them) | Edited by Janine Samuels (she/her)

I like to write my lovers to life.
Etching the experience into stone by word, to live and breathe from my bed, to the bath and beyond the confines of thought accompanied by sacral flashbacks,

I romanticise the fuck out of sex.
To make beauty of a hollow pit,
To breathe fire into my own escapism.

I like to tell tales about Grace and those who’ve seen me,
Never further than barely skin-deep,
Never thoroughly through the creases.
Cling peaches and cream have nothing on me.

See, I don’t only like to tell stories about the hard stuff that goes inside,
Also the hard stuff, sinking to reside within,
I do truly like to scream my insecurities, my suffering into the virtual void.

I like to tell these stories, but see, there’s a gaze that lurks in the shadows,
A constrictor slithering in my sacred hallows
Secretly constructing the reality that binds me to expectations.
“We don’t talk like that around here” reverberates around and now internally.

Where do you put your honest words when you feel you’ve outgrown your diary?
Holding together the names and faces of all the bodies who have
Loved you before,
Hurt you before,
Poetry slammed your head into the wall at a speed so incredible
You nearly missed it all
To agility taught by experience, fire and force.

Whether I slip these post-it notes between hardcover and binding or condense them into fleeting two-eighty characters, there seems to be no space safe enough to tell it to
Even the ears of a love and those who claim to can only take so much
Before they call cut for a take two,
It’s the watered down version they’re attuned to.

Where do you document your You?
When privacy is threatened by the same Purveyors, parading as public Heroes who have no qualms with violence as a love language?
In my youth, I took this challenge as an opportunity to change my tune,
Now I rest in the peace of discernment,
Sweetened by Grace that Sounds like You.

Noma Amadi (they/them) is a non-binary writer, photographer and coffee enthusiast, weaving worlds into existence, one story at a time. Based in the east of Johannesburg, Gauteng, their path to writing began through film & TV studies, which led them to the media & marketing industry. Noma’s short stories and poetry can be read on Medium: and their 2015 poetry EP, tilted “LUAMERAVA”, can be listened to on Soundcloud.