Three Questions for Gloria Ogo

What inspired your choice of genre / form for The City that Dreams in Our Bones?

I turned to poetry because it offers a form that can embody duality without resolution. The poem had to move between shadow and light, fracture and wholeness, memory and future vision. In African diasporic traditions, whether the Haitian marasa or Igbo ejima, doubling is not doom but a different kind of agency. I wanted the poem’s form to enact that: to flicker between images and registers, to let the stanzas open into silences where a second voice might be heard. Poetry allowed me to hold both haunting and possibility in the same breath. Rather than telling a straight linear piece, I wanted a form that could flicker like streetlights, hold silences like haunted buildings, and let ancestral voices drift through the cracks.

Can you walk us through your creative process for this piece?

The process began with light: a freeway on-ramp dissolving into kudzu and flickering streetlights. That image immediately spoke to me as a threshold, an in-between space where ancestral presence could enter the contemporary city. From there, I leaned into a process of layering, pairing images that might appear contradictory (cocktails and auction blocks, laughter preserved like molasses, starlight and shotgun shells), but that together captured the doubleness of diasporic experience. I revised with an ear toward rhythm, wanting the poem to flicker and pulse like a city haunted by memory, where each line break could feel like crossing from one skin to another.

What is the significance of this poem to you?

This poem matters to me because it reclaims the language of doubling. Where European traditions often treat the “doppelgänger” as fatalistic, I wanted to write toward the diasporic sense of a second skin that empowers, that remembers. For me, The City that Dreams in Our Bones is about how fractured identity is not only a wound but also a source of vision. It insists that shadows carry agency, that light can be born out of loss, and that ancestral presence still shapes our steps. It’s significant because it names what the city tries to erase, that our bones themselves are dreaming, guiding, refusing silence. It maps the haunted terrain of Black diaspora, the way cities, no matter how gentrified or glittering, still breathe with the bones of those who built and lost within them. For me, writing it was a way to honor that doubleness: to show how ruin and bloom, wound and survival, exist side by side. The “second skin” is my acknowledgment of living in layers: the self who moves through the present and the self who carries ancestral memory. What makes this poem significant is its insistence that the future is still ours to imagine, even if it asks the highest cost, the sky itself.

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 has served as 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. https://glriaogo.wixsite.com/gloria-ogo