Three Poems | Ber Anena

(cover photograph direction: Victor Akhere)

The Wall

When we saw skyscrapers gleaming

in the distance, we dug our heels harder

into the ground; cheered our bodies

 

to conquer the last mile. Whole countries

were strapped to our backs; dreams rattling

inside our chests like tambourines.

 

We were lucky—the Atlantic spat us

onto the shore before we became citizens

of the seabed. And there we were, in the

 

presence of a new wind. Inhaling the scent

of possibilities; of what we believed will be,

until we got to the border. What we saw

 

earlier was a wall still growing, each brick

chanting alien alien alien. Behind us, home

was a chimney puking smoke, crumbling walls

 

singing: don’t come back don’t come back

don’t come back. We learned that humans,

like waste, can be discarded.

 

Scale the wall and meet horse whips halfway

to the top. Surrender children to cages on

the other side. Float on this haunted hallway

 

until you begin to make meals of each other.


The Body as a Walking Riot

 

The monstera stretched across the kitchen

counter, colonised spaces past its borders

 

until I stuck a stick by its stem and tamed

its flailing limbs with a rope. My own life has

 

been scattering in different directions, mind

working double shifts to ignore the therapist’s

 

rumblings about tending to familial wounds,

breaking generational burdens and living in

 

the moment. I still have sticks and ropes,

should any of my houseplants consider

 

wandering. At night, I dream of the same

hack, but this time I try to prune

 

the riot I carry inside.


The world, freshly widowed sings

 

Walk briskly away,

grief. I’ve released my stomach

from the grip of a black cloth.


Ber Anena
is an Acholi writer from northern Uganda. Her poetry and prose have been published in The Atlantic, Transition Magazine, adda, Black Warrior Review, Off Assignment, The Caine Prize, and New Daughters of Africa anthologies. Anena was the 2018 joint winner of the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa for her poetry collection, A Nation in Labour. She won the 2024 Vreeland Prize for Fiction and received recognition for the 2023 Marie Sando Prize for the Short Story (2nd Place) and the 2024 Plentitudes Prize in Fiction (3rd Place). Anena attended the MFA Writing program at Columbia University in New York and is pursuing a Ph.D. in English (Creative Writing) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her debut memoir, The Lies We Tell for America is forthcoming from Flatiron Books in Fall 2026.

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