Kyle Okeke - African Poetry Book Fund

Butterflies

How fun is it to be “at risk,” to flicker
like the monarchs born daredevils?
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Black, I have a 50% chance
to get HIV in my lifetime.
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I love my brother.
He still calls me a faggot

when he’s angry. I think he loves me.
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A glass mirror is a good comedian, edgy and reflective.
Though my brother is more
like a lake when he kills a crowd
of me. I walk in and somehow another me
survives to do the same.
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I once asked a man to hit me and call me a faggot.
I thought I’d like it.
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The ember is the best unit of sex.
It left a kaleidoscope
in my temple of stained-glass: Torches
cast through the image of a torch, a race
between the flames and the string
of saliva thinning–
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An arrogant priest
thinks he knows what’s on the other side
of the glory-
hole.

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Candles are the worst at worship
and war. They cry silently
as they burn, rimming
the darkness, running
themselves down
to the base. The vigil
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is over.
Submerged, I saw the lanterns blinking
above water before they, too,

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sunk.
Is the poem an ember,
a lake,
or a hole
I run my tongue through?

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The answer is, I loved my brother, then
I loved him.

Matthew 6:28—Sonnets

Two doors in the snow:
Two men in

excess. Beauty, they
restrain, like

a grave. Its ghost, cold
and falling.

I was looking for
meaning, too.

I found a sidewalk:
More doors laid

like planks. A vulture
starving for

light, I found a knife
I sank in-

to the white, soft wage:
An angel

carved in his image.
Arrested

by the path, knife wet
with glimmer,

weapon left in snow—
I felt his

chest like a trapdoor.
The inmates

carry themselves up
in bouquets.

In the closets, fields
of lilies.

Runaway

River

The face
on cold metal
rustling bells in deep
foliage

Snow

Mother’s first
slap to her child
little footsteps
on water

Lemon

Door–door
     the web torn
          into a bright
             hole–Pupil
       crush–The dive
and quick–Ribbons stroking
    the air–slug dried in the sun–
Sepia–Sepia–
        Bite–

Wizard

Giant hoods
     lake over pines
holy of dirt
  deep swaths
     of beetles

Mirror

Clack of pans
  in the woods
hushed of dark
father–smoke
  sewn into a lip
one boy leaving this world
       and into the next

After Staring Too Awkwardly at Men Holding Hands

Always jaywalking across this road.
Always the shadow of that tree stretched across concrete.
The car honks, and the shadow shakes the tree’s leaves.
Where are you going. Where are you going. I could kill you,

the road breathes. It’s always that cloud shaped like an arrow.
There is no cloud—but it’s always the bike that man is riding.
Thought of being that bike. Thought of being chained to the rail,
waiting for that man. No one will save you, panicked

the roach of the restroom, prey for the custodian.
Thought of being that roach. Thought, I could kill you.
Where are you going. Where are you going—

And the soap dispenser is all empty.
Thought of being that empty,
clicking only twice to realize.
Have you ever been so careless that you kept pushing?
Kept shoving your hand against that squeaking dispenser?
Is it asking me to stop? Or is it saying,

I remember the face of the man who tried me last night.
Beautiful was his smiling
disappointment. I thought to be that
smile, one not yet faded
but knowing
it will.

The Untrained Pianist

A little
ninety-nine cents sound, a little
quieter this evening, toiling
the doves, unscrewing their shank
and their saddle, their hackle and fringe,
beard and crop, vent and hock–flesh,
yes, and supposed–from the ceiling,
unscrewing, a little
pensively, “like fingering the belly”,
one says to me, tilting its little
eye and wing, jiggling the keys
of my giant door. How it spins
as I wind, a swelter drifting into,
into. Learning now, to press. A little
softer, he says. Dropping
with a short thud. All night
the hamper shakes. All night
the cat presses its wet ear
to the cloth and strokes the curtains,
all night he rises, back
into my bedroom, back out
the door, back till it can back
no more. Like a name.
Into the ceiling.
How I ask. His name.
A little softer, he says.
Softer. Even softer–
yes, hold it here, press
it there, throw it
there, and let
the dark floor
ring.

like a wish, traveling slowly.
One day you will reach me
up here. Up here, up here!
Where boys like you glow sweet.

Butterfly Weed

Vermillion beam, dilating the dim prairie–
The rain, by now, bestowing the marsh-like glint
like forgiveness: its spark and wane shifting
at the subtle turn of the boy’s neck, away from the living.

The goldenrod path
pats the legs: gentle
fathers with the consistency
of prayer. Stand up, they speak,
now sharp and prick-mouthed.
Has kneeling ever stopped us–
the path now contracting, re-
leasing, then contracting,
as it vibrates like a string plucked by the thumb
of sainthood, its other hand: the whisking
stare of the coyote.

As for the aster,
of which the mist
cloaks in ashen
communion, the dew
heavy with providence,
as the drip of it flicks
that blue petalled head,
it too was once a child
lined at the altar.

Then it is morning. A white light fills the gray of the boy’s skull
as it rests on crimson whips of earth, like an early moon
forgetting its place. Forgetting order. Nailed to the wake—
Only from there does the boy witness the weed’s perennial tinge of pink,
before the zephyr of consciousness–finally–wipes the bone clean.

Suicide 12 – The Mail Opener

And if I like the shimmer
of the blade in the office
lights? Swiping it across the envelopes,
I picture you, dark man and tome.
It is not the blade I swing
but the light itself, tearing
the misshapen gate through the black
fold. And have you too seen
the white ash of your reward
boasted by its own weight and will-
owed into air?
Smoke signal. Or odd root.
Mock snow or dumb ghost.
I will not save you.

This Box

The boy entered the night as a palm slowly gliding over a sheath.
Or a psalm passingly drawn on a sheaf of papers.
When he was younger, he finger-painted the beheading of his mother.
Dipping the finger in the red mirror, it is a messy art.
Smearing the red in an oval, the eyes two quick blotches of the thumb.
The frown, one persistent stroke.
The head scattered across the white plane.
And the body, only the red outline of a skirt.
And when his mother found the art, she did sit him down.
And she did accost him.
As if sternly speaking to a vase she sat on the shelf.
That time, she could not knock him.
As transience slowly slid in disrepair.
Across the boy’s lips, the mother’s red lipstick.
The unsheathing of the night.
The specked silver of the wig in his palm.
In his psalm, there was the end of his suffering.
As he trod, barefooted on the concrete.
And the retreating lights of cars passed back into the other worlds.
And though the boy’s body felt he could not do it.
He did remove his dress.
He did remove his flesh.
And in front of him, I placed the box into the poem.
And he bent himself again into the small child.
And his limbs did crack like the twigs of a trail.
And he did fit inside this box, inside this psalm.
And I did close it, again.

Suicide 14 – Grindr

And what if I like being the black square
above the land’s flexed chests and flaunted pits?
The headless men still trail me like smoke to a flare.

Nameless in the tall field, like a deformed hare.
To the hunters, its flesh is only the distance.
And what if I like being the black square

for the men who picked both truth and dare.
Their hands cruising through the veiny thicket,
the headless men still trail me like smoke to a flare.

You can’t see the walls in this tunnel. Stare
into me, as I undress down to my wits.
And what if I like being the black square:

my flesh, a different type of nowhere.
All mystery and portal, all sky and dark slit.
The headless men still trail me like smoke to a flare.

And I trail them, forming a frame in the air.
The picture of me. The starless night. How it fits!
And what if I like being the black square?
The headless men still trail me like smoke to a flare.

Kyle Okeke is a Nigerian-American writer from Sugar Land, Texas, whose work appears or will appear in the following literary journals: Glass: a Journal of Poetry, Foglifter, and Poetry Magazine, among others. He is pursuing an MFA in creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin’s New Writers Project.