Asphyxia

/ Second Place, 2026 Plentitudes Prize in Poetry /

When a country cannot guarantee the security of life and property for residents of its federal

capital, people have reasons to fear—ThisDay Newspaper.

to talk about this place, this land, is to speak about fallow soil, not an aberration but an

inheritance from a dead father’s tongue. for some of us floating around this poem, the

only register registered is violence: the way a police officer’s right hand sears through

the cheek of an Uber driver who refuses to tip. and this is why our laughter is an oak

tree’s bark: our ancestors’ faces. we scurry away from uniformed men, like constantly

fastening a Square Stronghold around our souls’ hasp. imagine strolling into a chapel to

pray, and after killing the night with your prayer’s knee, your prayer requests smirk at

you the way a hammer surrenders its wooden body to an anvil. and you sprint into

your cottage’s hollow—smell the steam of your skin emitting beneath your left leg, the

way pyre chokes the sky. the next day, a pastor creeps into his church only to collide

with a body of smoke building a halo around burnt bodies, wrapped in blue wrappers,

pluming toward the sky as if moonwalking their way into the right palm of God. I’m in

this poem, shoplifting meek verbs so that the reader doesn’t asphyxiate. who said that

poems die young? see how poems live longer than humans; even here, posterity will

know that once I lost my younger brother, a lawyer said: Sow your grief into my garden.