South

By Gloria Ogo

My mother saved rainwater in glass jars,
 lined them on the porch rail like soldiers,
 each one brimming with the ache of sky.

She said the South never forgets,
 every drop remembers
 the thunder that broke it loose,
 the soil that drank it down.

I used to sit with her on summer nights,
 listening to the cicadas saw through the dark.
 She’d point at the lightning bugs
 and tell me they were our ancestors,
 finding ways to stay visible,
 finding ways not to be forgotten.
​
When I was old enough to leave,
 I carried one jar of rain with me.
 It broke on the bus,
 spilling across my jeans.
 I smelled of sky for days,
 and I was ashamed of it,
 of what clung to me,
 ashamed of what I could not hold.

Years later,
 I would pour water into jars again.
 I line them on my own windowsill,
 watch the sun bend its gold into the glass.

The South still wakes me.

The South is not a place but a pulse.
 It taps me awake at 3:33 a.m.,
 a drum I didn’t choose beating
 inside my ribs.

I dream of red clay bleeding into sneakers,
 of pecan shells cracking open like gunfire,
 of church fans stirring the heat
 while the preacher calls down mercy
 from a God who sounds too much like my grandfather.

On the corner, Dollar General light hums
 like a halo no one asked for.

Cicadas drone like warning sirens.
 Magnolia petals rot sweet as bruises
 in the ditch.

And somewhere, a Confederate statue still lifts
 its stone hand,
 while children ride their bikes around it,
 their laughter bending the air,
 their brown legs a prophecy
 of who will remain
 long after the bronze erodes.

I carry this South in my throat,
 every hymn, every holler,
 every swallowed word that grew into a vine
 wrapping itself around my name.

When I open my mouth in another city,
 people hear it—the drawl, the heat,
 the river mud slick in my syllables.
 They ask me where I’m from.

I say: I am from the land that survives
 by refusing to die.
 I am from the South that keeps
 dreaming itself forward,
 even when the night is loud,
 even when the past
 still taps me awake.

---

Strange Pilgrim

By Gloria Ogo

(after the women who wait by the shore)

Mother lays out seven white stones
 on the veranda, one for each son
 lost to the sea or to uniforms.
 She says the tide remembers
 every name, even the ones
 we bury in                              silence.
​
At dusk, she sprinkles salt
 in a ring around our doorway,
 calls it protection, calls it
 a wedding veil for the dead.
 Inside, the walls smell
 of kerosene and wet cloth
 the ghosts have been washing again.

I follow her to the shore,
 where she folds a flag into a pillowcase,
 tucks in flowers, a loaf of bread,
 and the photograph of a boy
 smiling at a world that no longer exists.

The sea takes everything
 then returns its own story:
 a boot filled with coral,
 a button engraved with the sun,
 a tongue of foam whispering
 I do.
​
Mother lifts her hands,
 as if blessing a bride.
 The horizon trembles.
 For a moment, we believe
 the waves are walking home.

When morning comes, she sweeps the salt away,
 says grief should not linger longer than the tide,
 fingers like sparrows
 around the broom handle,
 each stroke a small forgetting.

At breakfast, she tells me
 that love is a ceremony without witnesses,
 that every bride of the sea must go alone.

Behind her, the window frames a horizon
 so blue it looks unreal.
 Somewhere beneath it,
 fathers, brothers, husbands
 are still walking, their boots filling with sand.

She keeps one stone in her pocket.
 At night, she rolls it between her palms,
 pressing her thumb into its cool surface
 until the edge warms and softens.
 She whispers into it
 names, prayers, or maybe only
 the sound of her own breath.

And when I ask if she still dreams of them,
 she says:
 Dreams are pilgrims, child.
 You let them in only when you can bear
 to be found.

Outside, the sea breathes.
 Fog, the kind that hides footprints.
 Mother ties her scarf tighter,
 steps into the whitening air.

We gathered at the shoreline with our small offerings:
 letters, lockets, folded uniforms,
 names worn smooth from being spoken nightly.
 The tide came in shyly, as if embarrassed
 by how much we still believed in return.

My neighbor says her son’s voice
 still calls through the pipes when it rains.
 Another woman salts her doorstep.
 Every morning she sweeps it clean,
 and every night she pours more.
 
We do not pray aloud.
 We let the wind speak through our cupped hands,
 through conch shells that remember every command.
 Somewhere, the soldiers dream of us,
 their mouths full of dust,
 their eyes rinsed with sky.

We tell ourselves the ocean
 is only pretending to keep them.
 That beneath each wave,
 their bodies grow wings made of coral and bone,
 their laughter spilling through kelp and iron.

When the moon lowers its white flag,
 we return to the edge        wives, mothers, brothers,
 anyone who has learned to love absence.
 We take each other’s hands,
 dip them in brine, and vow again:

If they do not come back,
 we will become salt ourselves
 small, shining, and impossible to forget.

---

Archive of Watchers

By Gloria Ogo

At the border, cameras bloom like flowers,
 each one feeding on faces.
 A boy crosses with a bag of dust,
 his mother’s ashes or the home he can’t return to.
 No one asks. The footage will tell.
 The footage always tells
 then loses the telling.

In another country, someone edits the images,
 turns grief into data,
 pain into a heat map of the human condition.
 They call it analysis.
 We call it witness.
 
Some nights, the sky itself watches back.
 Its eye wide, unblinking,
 every star a record of what burned.
 I imagine them filing our stories in constellations,
 labeling each disappearance
 as if it were a form of light.
 
But even the watchers forget.
 Even the archive glitches.
 So I write this down
 for the woman brushing her hair,
 for the boy with the dust,
 for my father’s unsent text,
 for small kindnesses no one filmed.
 
Someone is always watching, yes.
 But sometimes,
 it’s just the wind
 passing through the blinds,
 reminding me I am still here,
 unrecorded, and alive.
 
Outside my window the streetlamp blinks
 like a tired god deciding who to remember
 you were here, you were seen.

In the neighbor’s glass, I glimpse
 a woman brushing her hair
 or maybe she is brushing the day away.
 Every motion a confession,
 a file saved in the cloud.
 
When my father died,
 I searched his phone for his last breath,
 as if the machine had watched him better than I did.
 It had: forty-three selfies,
 a half-sent text that read come.
 No one did.
 
Now I record everything.
 The baby crying through drywall.
 The protester’s voice turned static.
 The sun slipping through the CCTV’s blind spot.
 This is how we pray now:
 through storage, through backup, through glare.
 
Once, I dreamt the watchers asked me
 to testify against myself.
 I said: I saw too much.
 They said: That’s the crime.

Somewhere, someone is replaying this moment,
 pausing my face mid-blink,
 deciding whether I was afraid or alive.
 To witness, they say, is to love.
 But love too has become
 a kind of surveillance.

---

​Gloria Ogo is an American-based Nigerian writer with several published novels and poetry collections. Her work has appeared in Eye to the Telescope, Brittle Paper, Spillwords Press, Metastellar, Gypsophila Magazine, Harpy Hybrid Review, Allegro Poetry Magazine, among others. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and serves as a reader for Reckoning Magazine.

She is the winner of the 2024 Brigitte Poirson Literature Prize and a finalist for the 2024 Jerri Dickseski Fiction Prize, the 2025 ODU Poetry Prize, and the 2025 Rhonda Gail Williford Poetry Prize, earning honorable mentions. She is also a finalist for Lucky Jefferson’s 2025 Poetry Contest. Her work was longlisted for the 2025 American Short(er) Fiction Prize. https://glriaogo.wixsite.com/gloria-ogo