#BookRelease Yellow Means Stay #Anthology #African #shortstory

Yellow Means Stay is a collection of enthralling, sad, humorous, and heart-touching love stories from across Africa and the black diaspora. It features new and award-winning writers from across the African continent and beyond. The stories are a dynamic blend of the poetic and narrative, the spousal and familial, the suggestive and explicit, the dramatic and measured, the straight and queer, the sad and humorous, the past and future, life and afterlife. Through its pages, readers enter the world of African literature, love, and romance.

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Extract

The buttocks are like a married couple. Although there is constant friction between them, they will still love and live together. African proverb

ONLY STARS KNOW THE MEANING OF SPACE by Rémy Ngamije

He is a boy, a man, and a poet. I’m forced to take turns being with each one. I don’t tolerate the boy. I endure the man. But I love the poet. He’s the one who tells me the arms of the Milky Way spiral outwards from us. ‘Baby,’ he says, holding my face in his hands, ‘the planets tilt their axes towards us.’ He kisses me, a meeting of lips, a communion of souls. When he comes home to me, to our corner of the galaxy, he says time slows down when he’s with me. ‘Like when you read a good book, and the weather outside your window changes without you even realising it.’ The poet says when we’re apart, he struggles to find his feet: Lost— (Like the empty space between line breaks in a poem) —Eager to continue the sentence that is us. He writes things like that to me. It’s common to find an envelope stuffed with his compositions on my pillow when I go to bed, hidden amongst my shoes in the early morning before I go to work, or folded into my handbag when I’m shopping. I unfold them and read the neat handwriting, squeeze myself between the stanzas, and revel in my role as muse and girlfriend. I’ve been loved by men before. None of them have been artists. To be loved by someone who creates, who does, who tries to communicate his innermost being for a living is akin to being present during the First Seven Days. Can you imagine bearing witness to the awesome powers and the creation of life? It’s intoxicating. When the poet writes to me, I see his past, his present, and his hopeful future come to a point on his pen. The poet says, ‘Baby, you’re my true North.’ He is South. Our love spreads out from the furthest East to the westernmost side of West. He says our children will be named after the compass directions of our future travels. ‘Pick a place,’ he says, ‘and we’ll go there.’ I say I want to go to Ghana, and the poet says Ghana is mere geography. ‘We are gods. Accra-cadabra! We shall see Ghana.’ His self-assuredness books the flights. His words check-in the baggage of our dreams: Thailand (because it’s affordable), Colombia (for his beloved Gabo and whatever he believes is awaiting him in Barranquilla), Senegal (‘To track down the last of the griots,’ he says), New Orleans (for the Cajun cuisine and the Creole cool), Montego Bay (‘So you can flaunt that island gyal body, baby!’ His Jamaican accent isn’t on point, but I appreciate the sentiment). ‘All the lines of longitude and latitude shall know of our love,’ he says...