Revelation

Zaynab Bobi

When the doctor said to your mother,She walked out of the clockI painted three scenes:First, your breath went anti-clockwise: the hourhand walking backwards until it was swallowed by time.Second, you crossed out of time with the minute handstuck between your teeth — night had slipped into your mouth.Third, you drained your mother's chest and pouredyourself into it; swinging back and forth begging for gravity.Pain, too, is a child.

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Photo of Zaynab Bobi

Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi, Frontier I, is a Nigerian-Hausa poet, digital artist, and photographer from Bobi who is currently an undergraduate student of Medical Laboratory Science at Usmanu Danfodiyo University, Sokoto. She is the author of the forthcoming chapbook, Sixteen Songs of Loss, selected as a finalist by Rita Mookerjee (Sundress Publications Chapbook Competition, 2023), winner of the inaugural Akachi Chukwuemeka Prize for Literature 2023, and Gimba Suleiman Hassan Gimba ESQ Poetry Prize, 2022. She is a Pushcart and Best of The Net Nominee with works published or forthcoming in Strange Horizons, FIYAH Literary Magazine, The Drift, Uncanny Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, Tantabara Magazine, Agbowó, The Deadlands, Arc Poetry Magazine, Ake Review, Native Skin, Lucent Dreaming, 20.35 Africa, Trampset, and elsewhere. She tweets at @ZainabBobi.

Cover of Issue Ten of the Drift

Issue 10: Summer 2023

New York City, New York

Editors
Kiara Barrow
Rebecca Panovka

Founded in June 2020, The Drift aims to introduce new work and new ideas by young writers who haven’t yet been absorbed into the media hivemind and don’t feel hemmed in by the boundaries of the existing discourse. Our issues, published three times a year, feature longform essays and cultural criticism, short fiction, poetry, interviews, dispatches, and extremely abbreviated reviews.

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