Gloria Ogo
Gloria Ogo is an American-based Nigerian writer with over seven published
novels and poetry collections. Her work has appeared in Brittle Paper, Spillwords Press, Metastellar, CON-SCIO Magazine, Kaleidoscope, The
Easterner, Daily Trust, and more. With an MFA in Creative Writing, Gloria
was a reader for Barely South Review. She is also the winner of the Brigitte Poirson 2024 Literature Prize, the finalist for the Jerri Dickseski Fiction Prize 2024 and ODU 2025 College Poetry Prize both with honorable mentions.​
​​​
SUGAR BIRDS​
I remember the first time I saw sugarbirds in
the market outside Accra Mall—small bodies
dipped in shimmer, eyeing our spilled Fanta,
leaping like gossip between plastic bags.
The woman selling plantain told me
they mean sweetness is coming,
but she said it the way widows bless rain
in places where crops never rise twice.
Behind her: the half-demolished billboard of a
mobile bank merger—two European men
shaking hands, their smiles engineered to blend
with local air. The sugarbirds sang beneath them.
Inside the mall, air conditioning
too loud to think, I saw a child
pointing at a mannequin in Ankara
and saying, Look, mama—it’s me.
We bought imported grapes, each one
tasting like a joke I couldn’t translate,
and walked past a jewelry kiosk
where the gold was mined by ghosts
who still cough inside the shafts.
The sugarbirds don’t come here anymore.
Not since the speakers started playing
Afrobeat in English. Not since
the fishmonger took to whispering
prices like apologies.
Some mornings, I wake and taste
refined sugar on my tongue.
I never bought it.
It always appears.
A vendor offers me salt
that smells like a grandfather’s ghost—
warm, wet, and already forgiven.
When I hand her money,
the note turns to palm wine.
She doesn’t flinch. She sips.
The market breathes like a sleeping god
its ribs, tarpaulin blue; its heart, a radio
playing three stations at once. Sugarbirds
hover in the dusk like rumors.
They land only on things that remember
how the land used to pray before eating:
a rusted tin, a broken sandal,
a man who no longer sells yams, only
shadows of yams wrapped in nylon.
Someone’s mother swears the birds
can see time backwards,
that their wings beat
in the dialects of swallowed cities.
A girl runs past with a plastic doll.
The doll whispers Help me,
but only in colonial French.
No one answers.
I enter a booth made of mirrors. Inside,
I am wearing my ancestor’s face. It is
crying red dust,
speaking in a tongue
that clicks like insects but cuts like glass.
Sugarbirds circle overhead.
One lands in my mouth.
I swallow it whole.
Now I dream in soft armor,
in the currency of wings.