I still believe the devil exists that’s why I’m afraid of the dark even though the flames burn to give me light. The war all over my hands and I wear the blood-field as gloves. The morning led another queer boy to safety and the evening brought him back home. He is a bad child for giving himself to the same devil that killed sixteen queer boys. Even now I became the war myself; I worry over the boy I should have made a knight— breathe into him, speak to him like a mate with every language the war has given my tongue. I would say to him “This country won’t kill us if we forget our bodies are still wars ready to be battled.”

Ugonna-Ora Owoh is a Nigerian poet and model. He is a recipient of a 2018 Young Romantics/Keat Shelley prize and a 2019 Erbacce Prize. He is a winner of a 2019 Stephen A Dibiase International poetry prize and a 2018 Fowey short story prize. His recent poems are on The journal of Compressed Art, The Malahat Review, The Matador Review, The puritan, Frontier poetry, Crab Fat Magazine, Confingo magazine, The Vassar Review or elsewhere. He is featured in Pride Magazine and Puerto Del Sol Black voices series. He is a poetry reader at Helen literary magazine and The Malahat Review.