Kathleen Frank
Toxic Laughing Gas
Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi
at the verification center
a lecturer scanned my face
& inquired about my people.
i looked at him, & we both
burst our laughter into the air.
every one came out like a crow
but that didn’t stop us
from gathering. the thing is,
deep down, we could feel tiny
blackbirds eating out of it.
but we continued laughing
until there was nowhere else
for them to go. for us to go.
at the end, we swallowed & passed
the graveyard before our eyes.
Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi Frontier I, is a Nigerian-Hausa multidisciplinary artist, poet, and a Medical Laboratory Scientist from Bobi. She is the author of Cadaver of Red Roses (O, Miami Books) which won the 2024 Derricotte/Eady Chapbook Prize, winner of the inaugural Folorunsho Editor’s Poetry Prize 2023, Labari Poetry Prize 2023, the inaugural Akachi Chukwuemeka Prize for Literature 2023, and Gimba Suleiman Hassan Gimba ESQ Poetry Prize 2022, and the first beneficiary of Carolyn Micklem Scholarship. Her works appeared or are forthcoming in Strange Horizons, FIYAH, Uncanny Magazine, Poetry Daily, Agbowo, Poetry Wales, Torch Literary Arts, Utopia Science Fiction Magazine, Arc Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. Her second chapbook, Uncensored Snapshots, is forthcoming with Chestnut Review (2025). She is active on X and Bluesky @ZainabBobi.
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