POETRY

Runner-Up for the 2026 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize Honoring Jake Adam York

The Body That Walks Out of Fire Is Something Else

By Ìfẹ́olúwa Àyàndélé     VOLUME 59 No. 3

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The boy that walks into a bomb
in the market comes back in a coffin.
The girl in a white dress eats the wound

and becomes the rainbow. The boy’s
father is in a coffin, and he stretches
his hands to touch. The girl’s mother

wears her wound as night wears a black
gown with sprinkles of the stars.
The boy is the father. The girl is the mother.

The coffin is the boy’s home. The wound
is the girl’s nightgown. The boy’s father
has gone to war; the girl’s mother has joined

the confluence of stars. The boy has joined
the war. The girl has joined the stars.
The boy doesn’t know the war he is fighting;

he doesn’t know his enemies; he has joined
because it is the appropriate thing to do.
The girl and the mother are shot. The father

and the boy are bombed in their boulevard,
and the cemetery road is a highway
for bodies that jump out of the graveyard.

The bodies are walking on the street of a city
of tall buildings / tall dreams / streets in smoke /
crowds walking by / noise breaking places /

people in trains / traffic, long smokes / hungry
city / homeless in broken tents / people, not
smiling / cold whistling by / hardly anyone

in love. The war comes to the city in a white
dress on Christmas day, and the boy and his
father and the girl and her mother are eating

at a fish house, and the city is a lost dagger
in the river; the war eats the vein of the city,
and the coffin makers sold out their caskets.

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Ìfẹ́olúwa Àyàndélé is the author of My Father Paints His Dreams on My Body (Moon City Press, 2026), winner of the 2024 Moon City Poetry Award. He was awarded the 2026 Pink Poetry Prize from Great River Review. His recent work has been published or is forthcoming in Poetry London, Callaloo, Magma, Transition Magazine, Poetry Wales, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Michigan Quarterly Review. He is a PhD student in creative writing at Florida State University. He has received a fellowship from the Obsidian Foundation (UK) and is the Assistant Interviews Editor at Southeast Review.


VOLUME 59 No. 3