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Victoria Adukwei Bulley
VICTORIA ADUKWEI BULLEY is a poet, writer and filmmaker. She is the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award, and has held artistic residencies internationally in the US, Brazil and at the V&A Museum in London. A Complete Works and Instituto Sacatar fellow, her pamphlet Girl B (Akashic) forms part of the 2017 New-Generation African Poets series. She is a doctoral student at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she is the recipient of a Technē studentship for doctoral research in Creative Writing.

Articles Available Online


On Water

Essay

Issue No. 29

Victoria Adukwei Bulley

Essay

Issue No. 29

& we say to her what have you done with our kin that you swallowed? & she says that was ages ago, you’ve drunk...

Interview

Issue No. 26

Interview with Saidiya Hartman

Victoria Adukwei Bulley

Interview

Issue No. 26

The first time I encountered Saidiya Hartman, she was a voice in salt., an award-winning play by artist and...

DEDICATION   Flamingo, urchin, bestiaric beast: Paroling city matters, you re-form From pigeon’s dirty feather to a quill   A parlour game: we reach the dovetailing Between those singing spasmic pities that We summon, and the dank urbanity   You wreak It comes to punish this reserve Love: whether zoo, circus, menagerie, All matters of a name more so than form,   Let us rush towards autowilderness, Strifed with wet, chaostic humours 1 Erotic prescience : I sense us : one   We’ve taken flyte, so let us rest in shelter, Into the original of the world, Nothing can stop our loved country from mattering   ONE   *   There is a woman turning a woman turning itself on   Sick hydra starting up    I dream of sea becoming seaworthy to sea   The sea drownsy    in its offensive capability   Drownsy Baby        thirsting in its sleep        Hush now   Totemic fetish or mnemonic logo    :    her offensive cheep    :    untid’ly starting up for the tide    :                cheap   *   You cannot scry in your own silver when its ripples split the vision   They cannot peer into a depth they’ve mined        and filled Selfsang in their own gags        Dull drams overfilled —spilling unward   Eat your eyesight, bastard            Ring yourself unfit   *   Q: Where has this water gone? Why disappear?   A: Add an arch to the middle of valour There’s your answer       In the mean time, build a city        Then build a countryside for balance   Now, not sea at all                They become   ardor’s coldened shoulder            Ardor eccentric Radiating inward   Throttling at different purposes and speeds   *   TWO   An altared state urned in a loss of verse Severed then served with coming of the morning My love has earned this insurrective swerve That seeks to crash the calming of his mourning   *   You rest inequality   If I was embedded in a painscape, it’d be different   Q: Where do you rest? A: Camped out in the bedazzled house of his runtish fantasy   His House Believes   As it is now, there is an asterisk to every kiss     Let me rest in that nest of those pink, electric branches   There, there is safety   *   THREE   To have a handle on something is to have the capacity to turn it on or off   *   What I    cuse him of I    cuse myself   *   When they are together, their shape is endless and content   The sea drinking the sea                    The sea is drinking the sea   *   The vulvic octopus dies with her young Meanwhile, I:    waste    with my    youth   The staggering dear does not accept my hand, fawning

Contributor

October 2018

Victoria Adukwei Bulley

Contributor

October 2018

VICTORIA ADUKWEI BULLEY is a poet, writer and filmmaker. She is the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award, and...

Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s ‘Heads of the Colored People’

Book Review

October 2018

Victoria Adukwei Bulley

Book Review

October 2018

Somewhere on the internet is a two-hour video of a lecture by the late writer and filmmaker Kathleen Collins, author of the short story...

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fiction

February 2016

The Reactive

Masande Ntshanga

fiction

February 2016

My back cramps on the toilet bowl. I stretch it. Then I take two more painkillers and look down...

Prize Entry

April 2015

Every Woman to the Rope

Joanna Quinn

Prize Entry

April 2015

My father believed the sea to be covetous: a pleading dog that would lap at you adoringly, sidling up...

feature

February 2015

A Closer Joan

Shawn Wen

feature

February 2015

Here are a few of the Joans I know. The girl who arrives at Port Authority Bus Terminal in...

 

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