JK Anowe

A Road’s Guide to Kill

Like any city under no siege, she fell
to sleep watching me hear myself

think. Quite wholly
she fell, the child in the noose

of her mother’s arms. & the car breezes
towards another city that knows me

not by my scent or face, my fate
nor sweat, but by my fear—                                                 

that tragedy of arrival
to arrive to. & the sky came down

in mild cloaks of rain
multiplied into puddles

of more sky. Trees outside raced us
nowhere, windows wound down

only to let in a whiff of deadness—
of roadkill, months-old perhaps, & sole

-crushed leaves—how our nose
hair grabbed at its cologne

of rot & earth & flesh, all the silence
that rests amongst us

long enough to keep
our hearing from the dead.

I peel black clot off a knee-wound
to reveal another day, violent red

as any other day.
& it is the last hour 

in which she wakes, this
child, to continue watch

—her gaze piercing me full
of pores so microscopic I’m sure

she’s seen through me to the future.
A slow-dread enthusing none but itself.

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JK Anowe, Igbo-born poet and teacher, is author of the poetry chapbooks Sky Raining Fists (Madhouse Press, 2019) and The Ikemefuna Tributaries: a parable for paranoia (Praxis Magazine Online, 2016). He’s a recipient of the inaugural Brittle Paper Award for Poetry in 2017 and a finalist for the 2019 Gerard Kraak Award. Recent works appear in Palette Poetry, Glass Poetry: Poets Resist, Kissing Dynamite, the temz review, The Gerard Kraak Anthology 2019, The Shore, The Muse (University of Nigeria’s literary journal), Agbowo, 20.35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Fresh Air Poetry and elsewhere. He’s Poetry Chapbooks Editor for Praxis Magazine Online. He lives, teaches and writes from somewhere in Nigeria.