Jay Kophy
look / another dead black boy / certificate in hand / is walking out of the classroom more empty / than a forest with no tree it can call its own / more map-less than smoke / from a fire that is hungry enough to consume / whatever it attracts to its light / without leaving a name for remembrance / as if the dead only die to be remembered / as if all the dead boys / who are casualties of hunger / remembered to die but chose to forget their names / and when I say names / I mean the muscles that swell in your chest / when your voice is not ashamed of its nakedness like a full moon / or an open sky / that shows us how faithlessness is eating into us / but today in the news / a man told us he’s the only one / who can bring the dead boys back to life / and we believed him / enough / to forget that the living / are too selfish to help direct a ghost back into its body when it is lost / he told us / how he was going to breathe air / into the lungs of the dead boys / and reshape them into the sound of rain falling on dry land / so they don’t keep filling their mouths with namelessness / he told us / how he was going to fill their hands with water / to cure the hollowness in their palms / how he was going to return softness to their tongues / how he was going to bury in their throats a laughter / so thick / it could never decay / he told us all this / while his belly / was heavy with the dead boys’ dreams
Jay Kophy is a Ghanaian poet and writer. His poems have featured in literary magazines such as Glass Poetry, Praxis Magazine, Kalahari Review, Eunoia Review, Tampered Press and many others. His poem If the Body Could Speak appeared in the second issue of 20.35 Africa’s Anthology of Contemporary Poetry. He is also the curator of the anthology to grow in two bodies.