Longlisted/Shortlisted Poem: “Transgressors”
ADESIYAN OLUWAPELUMI is a medical student, poet, essayist and the poetry editor of Fiery Scribe Review from Nigeria. Amongst other honours, he won the 2025 Gbemisola Adeoti Poetry Prize, and has been an Adroit Journal Summer Program, SprinNG Writers’ and HUES Foundation fellow. His works are featured in The Republic, Electric Literature, Only Poems, 20.35 Africa, Isele Magazine, Poetry Sango-Ota, A Long House, Brittle Paper, Fantasy Magazine, Poet Lore, Tab Journal, Poetry Wales and elsewhere. His chapbook “Mouthful with Cinders” was selected by Chris Abani and Kwame Dawes for the APBF New-Generation African Poets Chapbook Box-set Series (Akashic Books).
Transgressors
Forgive me for the sins I have washed away in the brook,
in the bathwater that will not escape me.
I have watched the pond bloom with toxic algal.
I ask, what God can fumigate my decay?
What monsoon can pour her cauldron over my arid lands?
Even breathing has become a brutal play-act.
I am a drowning man, yet I thirst.
Who inflated my lungs with water
and called it air?
They say sobriety is a remedy,
the door to my salvation, yet ever useless
as an unlearned lesson.
Do not speak to me of abstinence
if you have not understood the irradiance of lust.
Hidden in the dim light of my room,
I touch myself in worship.
In glossolalia and the religion of hands.
My body opens trepid, blustery and raging
as the storm before Christ’s halting voice.
I want to be holy
but there is no opposite without God.
The Tempter disguises in many forms,
yet is known by none.
My mind is a temple,
where I have resisted God’s innominate presence.
I tell Him I no longer taste the salt of repentance.
I pitch Him as a manhole where everything
enters and leaves as a door.
Is this not the beginning of every transgression?
How the snake slithered into Eve
because she was porous.
God, are you here with me, in the drowning,
pushing out the water?
I want to be fulfilled again,
but there are places in the body we only fill
by emptying