Masks

Nana T. Baffour-Awuah

You own so many masks

that you have lost your own face

forgotten where it tightens with tension

and softens with joy

You have misplaced it all

beneath courteous costumes and polite plaster

Did you forget that living is too precious

to spend it collecting fake things?

Nana T. Baffour-Awuah (he/him) is a Ghanaian writer and editor currently based in New York. His poems, short stories, and essays have been published in Brittle Paper, Chronogram, Raven Review, African Writer, North Meridian Review, HuffPost, Sierra Nevada Review, and elsewhere. His work has also been anthologized, most recently in Creative Stillness (Gatekeeper Press, 2026) and Smitten with the Written (Arcana Poetry Press, 2026). Nana is a poetry editor for The Hummingbird and a reader for Callaloo. He is working on his first book. IG: @whatnanawrote

Masks

Make literature part of your everyday life.

Carefully curated stories and poems you can read in under 5 minutes, sent straight to your inbox.