JK Anowe | Sepulchre | Poets Resist | Glass: A Journal of Poetry

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 a finalist for the 2019 Gerard Kraak Award. Recent works appear in Glass Poetry, 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.

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Also by JK Anowe: Credo to Leave Aubade with Notes on DNA You Sing of a Leaving

Previously in Glass: A Journal of Poetry: Love in the Time of Arrests

Poets Resist
Edited by Sneha Subramanian Kanta
December 13, 2019

JK Anowe

Sepulchre

The phonograph needle pierces my tongue & Fela for the first time in two decades sings from a body — a body when defined is a body depending on autopsy is testimony depending on audience is country according to plot twist — He sings of the tragedy already written, the constitution of our country — how we neither end nor preface but corroborate it. In a crowd of onlookers, his wife colludes, in public displays of affection, with the dictator. She strips — & it is democracy as we must know it — the curriculum of crows administered on execution grounds — a rope loops into brash percussions into cigarette mist into serpent, that ancient diplomat, above his head. & we hear in his baritone the dumbfoundery of a nation. Such is the fury of a man who sings — whose woodwind moves us to be free — to be part of speech. A spit-throw away, just beyond spectacle & stage orderlies are gunning patriots down with tranquilizers, bodybagging them in straitjackets. Somewhere else, the music in us stirs — night carrying in it no inhabitants of praise.

This poem was written more than six months ago but proves to be timely, especially now in my country, Nigeria, where a democratically elected president has no regard for the rule of law, arresting innocent citizens who dare to challenge his government and disobeying court orders for their release. So what Sepulchre does is interrogate what it means to live in such a time, using Fela Kuti, the Nigerian multi-instrumentalist, musician, composer, pioneer of the Afrobeat music genre and human rights activist, as a conduit.