Roseline Mgbodichinma

Roseline Mgbodichinma is a Nigerian writer whose works have appeared or in The African writer Magazine, The Hellebore, West Trestle Review, JFA human rights mag, Serotonin poetry, Artmosterrific & elsewhere. She won the Audience Favorite award for the Union Bank Campus writing challenge – Okada books, she is the third prize winner for the PIN food poetry contest and a finalist for the Shuzia Creative writing contest. She is a recipient of the NF2W9 2020 poetry scholarship. You can reach her on her blog www.mgbodichi.com and Twitter @Rmgbodichinma.

HOW I LEARNT TO DRIVE by Roseline Mgbodichinma

March 15, 2021 · Fiction

Sometimes brown girls can wear black. Not the colour, but a mood, a presence, a halo. I hold my aunt’s hand as she struggles with the chain. I want to tell her there’s no use, it can’t cage her spirit, but I stop myself. The Ward smells of grudges and longing. What is madness, if not a pile of lost love and mercy? There is something about blue that’s retrograde. It’s the colour of sky fading into evening, the colour of hospital bedsheets the severe cases lie on. Scratch on the walls suggest a previous occupant might have had claws….

Crow Jonah Norlander