Longlisted Poems: “Lagos Never Sleeps” and “Portraits of a Man on Fire”
CHIMEZIE UMEOKA is a Nigerian writer of the Igbo extraction. His work has appeared in several journals and publications, including Lolwe, Brittle Paper, Afrocritik, and The Kalahari Review. He has served as editor for The Muse Journal, and is an English and Literary Studies major at the University of Nigeria, as well as past Custodian of The Writers’ Community in Nsukka. His poetry chapbook, MOONCHILD, won the 2024 Pengician Chapbook Awards.
Lagos Never Sleeps
the Lagosian cityscape
is much like its people—
a megalopolis wearing
the condemned clothes of colonial history
like all these black boys
dressed in safaris, wearing dust
with their eyes full of untapped dreams.
it is how everything burns and yet
preserves itself in the dampness of its ashes.
it is how the Cowrywise train dances
above the slum of Makoko like all
these elites who have learned to
perch on bourgeoisie restaurants as though
they are afraid of being in places where
the art of classisism hangs as abattoir shadows.
the car passes along the Toll-gate
and there is a lean woman squatting against a wall
with her sun-dried babies holding unto her
flannel breasts, and maybe they are waiting
for their father whose October blood is strewn
on the asphalt as graffiti for countrysong.
Lagos never sleeps, like
these lagoonal boys sitting atop
the barricade of the mainland bridge
with the cinematic silhouette of dead dreams
hanging above them; like
these school girls riding canoes to school and
smiling at another news magazine by moonlight.
Lagos never sleeps, like me,
returning from a nocturnal poetry festival
where a white lady recites poetry in Spanish
to a group of ethnic-rooted Lagonians with
Niger-congo linguistic ears.
I am wondering if this is why Lagos never sleeps—
daily regaling itself to the complex traditions
of diversity,
to the abbreviation of our lives
capitalized in the phrase of ONE NIGERIA.
Portrait of a Man on Fire
The doctor says the history of drugs
Settles somewhere in his bowels—
Cannot be released.
The veins under his skin are deaf
They do not answer to the praying and calling voices
And needles like searchlights cannot
Find them in the darkness of the disease
And no matter what you ask of some men
Silence gives them faith
In that land full of morbid visions.
The woman sponges his body
With water as milky as memory
Another woman, somewhere, washes
A baby boy in a tub populated with toys
I swear, there is something fucking memorable
About burning men, some innocence
Made familiar by the women of the Ganges.
When the disease eats beyond his ribcage
His eyes spread docile like a hole
Dug in the sky and the tooth gums
Shine like a sun with no one to watch it
Except the children now listen to his final Proverbs
With his degenerating skin a mythology for their hands
And nothing really makes concrete sense to them until
His body scatters on the floor beneath the damp shawl
Like one beautiful answer uttered
By a silent god.