Growing up on a farm 30 kilometers away from the nearest village, I began working every December at a vegetable shop located diagonally across from the bank starting at the age of 15. This experience eventually led to a job interview and an offer to join the bank when…
You fall apart on your bathroom floor
These four walls torment me day and night
You spend your mornings collecting the tears
Your evenings counting the scars
How silly it is,
That the weeds keep shooting up in the garden that is your heart .
You pluck them out
To replace them with flowers of joy
Then…
POEM:
Do you remember?
When we laughed without fear,
The days of milk and honey
Back when we lived for today
Never afraid of tomorrow
Smiles decorated our child like faces
As we twirled and danced our fears away
Offsprings of love and peace
Naive to the world and its rage
We held on to hope
Never letting the sun…
FemaleHood
Being a woman is learning
how to exist loudly
in a world that prefers you quiet.
It is carrying questions in your body,
answers in your silence,
and still choosing softness.
It is remembering yourself
even when the world tries to name you first.
It is becoming,
every single day,
without permission.
– By AJ Pearl
aka Aisosa Joseph
Instagram: SheIsAJPearl
Mirror, Mirror. Who’s the prettiest of them all?
Not me. Certainly.
Look at all the beauties out there.
Surely, have you seen my crooked smile?
What about my pimples?
And what about my big ears?
Oh, how glad I am that you can only see my face.
For I hear my legs are manly, far from…
To smile when your bones hum with ache,
to laugh even as your hands tremble
not because the hurt is gone,
but because you’ve made a pact with the light
to outshine it.
To dance when the sky splits open,
not in spite of the storm,
but because of it
to let the rain baptize you
into something…
From the moment I could speak, my mother, a Sunday school teacher with a heart full of faith, taught me and all my siblings how to pray. It began with simple words of gratitude before meals. Then came morning prayers for guidance, which we prayed as sunlight crept through…
At first, change felt like a heavy backpack,
Full of things I didn’t know how to unpack.
“Where do I even start?” I would sigh,
Stuck in old habits, too scared to try.
Then I noticed the little things…
A missed call, a hurt loved one’s face,
The way my stubbornness left no space
For love…
I grew up in a small, run-down house on the village outskirts of Thohoyandou, a town where hope often felt like a luxury we couldn’t afford. Money was always scarce. My mother, a single parent with no steady job, worked tirelessly, taking whatever odd jobs she could find, just…