this morning feels like a dead poem—
                       breath heavy with blackbirds nesting in cracked lungs.
still, I withhold prayer. I don’t wish my diagnosis to read like a requiem folded into God’s silence. the music no longer threads memory, only anxiety without teeth running agape, white-knuckled beside my twin brother. that one Easter, we played Jesus and the donkey; folded laundry like a penitent hymn. even the moon hung like a  soft bulb as we clapped hands into a plastic church, & made small black disciples of a prefigured epiphany. but when love pulps, nothing splits the wind with fluttering wings. nothing shields the sun from a fugitive mouth. maybe this is all grief is: the grave, unburied, walking beside us. I still fail to forgive the pen that edited my brother’s suicide note. somewhere outside my soul, a room still needles my ribs. a boy, learning to sculpt survival into small victories, calls it therapy. a girl on her third therapist, googles five ways for a painless exit, and names it a babel tongue to bargain her peace. I still look toward April with that first hot flush of joy, that unlatched the playful animals in us. nothing made us cleaner than being vulnerable in the mud. April is here again, & love no longer believes in silver linings, only in this helpless ache of staying— bones crumpled like a broken furnace, blood stretched like a faulty IV drip. I’m softly becoming a thing wrapped in a cactus smile, the wildest urge to teach dysphoria 101 through these same veins. but the mirror does not lie, she say, so if no one hasn’t told you lately: the world is better because you’re still in it.

Winner’s Biography

CP Nwankwo (he/him), SWAN IV, writes from Port Harcourt, Nigeria. He is a poet, historian, and editor. He was the Honorary Mention of the Akachi Chukwuemeka Prize For Literature, 2024, a finalist of the Lucky Jefferson Poetry and Prose Prize, 2024, Folurunsho Editor’s Poetry Prize, 2024, and was shortlisted for the Unserious Collective Fellowship Prize, 2024. His work is published/forthcoming in Palette Poetry, Mizna, Consequence Forum, Lucky Jefferson, Rough Cut, Muse UNN, Poetry ColumnNND, and elsewhere. He tweets @ CP Nwankwo.