The Creative Edge

[INTRO: KAMOTA] I stand on the other side of it, Hoping it will fall— This wall, Keeping from the inner most parts of your soul, Maybe you live by that—real men don’t cry, Well, I don’t need you to be real, I need you to be true, I can't do us if there is no you,  If you cry me a river, I will drown in your love. [VERSE 1: LUKA] Honestly, sometimes the only motivation speech I need, Is your fingers in between the spaces on mine, Holding my hand when pain clouds the sight of my mind, And the only soothing voice I need is your arms wrapping themselves around me, Sharing the warmth of your love— When the winter of failure dares to bury me in a coffin of ice, So don’t you! Don’t you dare say you love me, just look at me with those big eyes and let me dance in the sanctuary of being so wanted— Death cannot afford the price tag to purchase me from the store of your life, Silence… [BREAK] [VERSE 2: LUKA] You said: “if you’re so vulnera

Placed in a crowded dining room turned exam room—pen in hand, calculator and ruler on either side of a small uneven and antiquated desk—I, like many of my fellow students, hacked away at the  tough Mathematics paper. Fighting to recollect formulae and a barrage of other mathematic solution roadmaps, I surrendered rather peacefully to the mental assault of this paper. As customary among many University students, I cowered under the old: “We didn’t learn this in class” euphemism. We were writing this paper around the same time Load-shedding was rearing its ugly head; which is an engineering problem and here we were writing Engineering Mathematics, some of Zambia’s brightest. And as epiphanies can be notoriously known for hitting you when you least desire them, I asked: “is what we are doing working?” and the secondary (notoriously existential) question: "what's the point?" Now, discussing education can be as polarizing as discussing politics or religion. But to the me

A Short Story by Luka Mwango Edited by Casey Gift Nyambe I was returning from home after a hectic day at the office. I could not wait to see my lovely wife and our adorable five-year old daughter. The headlights of my car caught the outlines of a motor vehicle parked on the curb of the road. A figure stood next to it and from what I could gather, the car had broken down. I had a strong urge to drive on but the rebuking voice of my mother lingered somewhere in my memory: “Do unto others what you wish them to do unto you.” I stopped my car and got out. I walked towards the car and for some reason I expected the person in need of assistance to be some overweight, middle-man with a bad attitude. When I got close enough to the make out the person in the dark, I froze. It was not a he, but a she, a very attractive she. She was tall, had a long symmetrical face with big enchanting eyes and succulent lips. She had a busty chest and the seemingly tight blouse she wore was  chokin

Jenny wasn’t beautiful, her forehead was slightly more pronounced, her cheeks puffy, her lips thinned and her skin difficult to maintain in the heat. However, she did have eyes that moved men to arenas of sensuality that very few women could, and an attitude that would never apologize for it. Jenny understood what many women in her position understood—sex is leverage. Power. Control. On that cold night on Christmas Eve with the wind combing her skin and her hands stashed away in her coat she paused at the door of a pub tucked away in a corner of Lusaka’s biggest shopping mall. Jenny looked at two men heading her direction…and smiled. The men looked at each other as if trying to verify that they were not seeing things. “Will you gentlemen be so kind as to open the door for me, its freezing, I don’t want to expose my hands to the cold.” The men nodded and both reached for the door. After a few awkward seconds of what nearly degenerated into an argument over who would open t