JK Anowe | Love in the Time of Arrests | Poets Resist

JK Anowe, Igbo-born poet and teacher, is author of the poetry chapbooks The Ikemefuna Tributaries: a parable for paranoia (Praxis Magazine Online, 2016) and Sky Raining Fists (Madhouse Press, 2019). He’s a recipient of the inaugural Brittle Paper Award for Poetry in 2017 and was a finalist for the 2019 Gerard Kraak Award. Recent poems appear in or are forthcoming from Fresh Air Poetry, The Muse, Agbowo, The Shore, and elsewhere. He’s Editor: Poetry Chapbooks, for Praxis Magazine Online. He lives, teaches, and writes from somewhere in Nigeria.

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Poets Resist
Edited by Logan February
July 24, 2019

JK Anowe

Love in the Time of Arrests

The orderlies come in their tens. I am just one man — One poet honed to one poem that is the sentence of my life. Or where it departs. 25 with no job prospects I lie palpable — you curved like a comma by my side — on my mother’s old couch the same one we’ve sat on to blame stuff on the government or rumpled our skins dry-humping on — complaining of things we wish didn’t exist. Like capitalism. Or God. Or the hairline between. & they come — the orderlies, in their tens. In pressed-out uniforms cassock-white. They come. Because there’s nowhere else to go. We ready our razors, unhinge ourselves forearm to wrist — the way wind chimes must open to catch wind. Our pains’ last threshold inviting them to enter.