Poetry by Daniel Naawenkangua Abukuri

1. Smear your palms with the dust of the Savannah and press them against the trunk of the ancestral baobab. See how the bark, scarred by time, creates a map of ridges?

2. There is no clear silhouette. What is clear, scanning the red earth from the wells to the clearing, are the mirror-image of a commerce in souls: the clink of cowries, the smell of shea butter on parched skin, and the heavy, rhythmic breathing of the chained.

3. Close your eyes and see the red.

4. What is the texture and mood of this earth? What thirsts, echoes, or bitter trades does it hold in its grit?

5. Then the edge of the shadow.

6. In the memory of Salaga, the silence is not empty. It is amber, a thick and heavy heat. Everywhere the body was bartered is the color of a bruised mango, sweet and fermented with age.

7. Place your hands behind your back and feel the binding.

8. The market appears like a heat haze: centered in the crossroads, centered in the marrow of the north. It appears beneath the modern street noise and above the forgotten shackles. It appears to be a haunting of the present. It appears the ancestors are closing their eyes, are seeing through us.

9. What absences do you see? What trades have printed themselves onto the architecture of your heart?

10. To make this history, the sun baked the sweat and the salt into the clay and pressed the weight of the Sahel onto the landscape. Then the Harmattan dusted a fine, grey ash on top, which adhered to the memory’s stickiness.

11. There is no price tag in the top half of the clearing. Instead, a negative space, a rich, golden void that breathes into the space of the diamond-shaped square.

12. The color of a worn-out cowrie shell.

13. What must it feel like to be in a place of trade; to remain visible only in the things that were lost?

God and Other Easy Metaphors

Years ago, I wrote a story titled “The Choice.”
God served as an easy metaphor for the ceiling,

and the girl, she was the texture of a window left
cracked in a storm. The nameless protagonist, a boy

who mistook his pulse for a sin, who was,
of course, a thinly veiled version of myself, believed

the very air was a courtroom: a sudden breeze was a pardon,
the thick, unmoving heat of Accra was a sentence

he had to serve. Plagued by this divine surveillance,
I imagined him standing

at the edge of a Pentecostal clearing, trying to decide between
the scripture and the salt on her neck, which tasted of the sea

and a certain rebellion.
But no matter how loud the choir sang, the world was never

quiet enough. Despite my best efforts, that old narrative was brittle;
it lacked the nuance of sweat and a convincing resolution.

Now, why am I telling you all this? Well, one day I woke up
and it was a Tuesday in the actual life I have settled into. Outside my

window, the neem trees looked like the day before,
but the light hit the dust in a way that reminded me of the altar,

how I once stood there, convinced that loving her meant losing the sky.
It felt foolish to consider my soul then, the idea of a permanent

ledger. Still, I put on my coat and walked past the old chapel.
As if I had invented it, there were people weeping in the pews,

and there she was, or a memory of her, leaning against a taxi.
Walking there, between the shadow of the steeple and

the noise of the road, a runner passed me, and a man
selling cold water from a plastic basin,

and my life, I understood, was just like their lives,
marked by hungers, mercies, and

theories about the spirit.
Nothing was as catastrophic as I had imagined it back

then, but just as I had needed it,
the choice between the girl and the God

still humming in the marrow, cold and very still,
like a marble pedestal engraved with an ancient, simple fact.

A Plot Hole in the Holiday

By the time the light softened, the neighborhood boys were dragging a goat across the ground of the yard… They pulled, lost their footing, found the pattern on the second try. I’d spent the morning trying to find the specific brand of vegetable oil she liked & didn’t think I’d get the scent right, then stood awhile attempting to be useful, to regard the women shredding ginger and garlic with a sense of belonging, patience, & not the usual hurry that lives in my chest. Yesterday, a cousin was explaining how the best jollof depends on the scorched bottom of the pot ––the burn, he’d said, the necessary wreckage for a certain kind of sweetness. On the drive over the air was thick, I saw an old cinema poster peeling from a wall, the lead actor’s face fading into the brick, promising a sequel that never came, & waited for a sign of how to begin. Like how she’d told me I needed to hold the memory without breaking it, but how? I mean it literally: I can’t figure out the grip. In a book, an essayist claims that grief is just love with nowhere to go. But what about the opposite, what it would mean to keep that love on a low simmer, like a perennial stew? This is me trying to find the sequel. For something familiar to return. A new kind of listening. The willingness to stay in the kitchen for the possibility of a ghost. At the gate, a woman with my mother’s exact laugh leaned against the pillar as she waved. I waved back. Looking closer now, the family gathering around the table were shouting over the music, & as I caught the pitch of their joy. I could tell the story wasn’t over at all, but only waiting for the screen to flicker back to life.

Bio
Daniel Naawenkangua Abukuri (he/him) is a Black poet and prose writer from Ghana. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Transition Magazine, The Malahat Review, Colorado Review, Chestnut Review, Orion Magazine, Minyan Magazine, Protean Magazine, Berkeley Poetry Review, Decolonial Passage, Mantis, A Long House, The Poetry Lighthouse, and elsewhere. He is a nominee for the Best of the Net, Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, BREW Poetry Award, and the 2026 Caine Prize for African Writing; the first-place winner of the 2025 African Writers Award (Poetry); the winner of Poetry Archive Now Wordview 2025; and a finalist for the 2025 Adinkra Poetry Prize. He was also longlisted for the Renard Press Poetry Prize, is an Obsidian Foundation Fellow alum, and was featured at the Obsidian Foundation Showcase with The Poetry Society.