Anti-Matter | Anthony Ikeh

(cover photograph direction: David Obi)

(Praise for Samuel Adeyemi’s Anti-funeral)

Today everything is beautiful


You will read the entirety of this poem in disbelief,

as a driver

speeds around the bend searching for redemption.

There’s no grief on the hill.

Let’s bask in the sun.

Watch me terraform into a rainbow

Here, I ignore my mother’s

ghost till it dissolves into thin air.

A black boy, too

can dream of elation.

My lover says I smell like candour

I shift the napalm under

the bed — further away from my gasoline guilt.

My father, too, puts down his gun — his little boy

almost made him proud.

I am proof that night never lasts

forever & if you pray long enough, dusk

arrives with a few blessings.

There was something before this

limbo & longing but don’t dwell on that,

I come from a bullet & I promise

I’m innocent so long as you don’t give me a name.

I, too, can hold a body & not

make it a corpse. Can hold a hand

& let it just be that.

Not everything I kiss requires a miracle — I am

capable of so much more than ruin.


Anthony Ikeh
is a psychology undergraduate in the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He enjoys watching films and football as well as debating. He’s published on Brittle Paper, The Kalahari Review and Metaworker Literary. He tweets @lanalovesbooks0.

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