Jonathan Chibuike Ukah is a Pushcart-nominated poet from the United Kingdom, whose work has appeared in Propel Magazine, The Journal of Undiscovered Poets, Atticus Review, Zoetic Press, Unleash Lit, Sublimation, and more. His poetry blends personal reflection with universal themes, often exploring identity, memory, and the complexity of human relationships.
In 2023, Jonathan won The Alexander Pope Poetry Award for The Pierian, highlighting his talent in the literary world. He followed this with the Unleash Creatives’ Editor’s Choice Prize in Poetry in 2024, and was shortlisted for the Minds Shine Bright Poetry Prize the same year.
With his evocative style and profound insights, Jonathan continues to gain recognition as an emerging voice in contemporary poetry, pushing the boundaries of the genre with his thoughtful and compelling verse.

Modern Love

The world visited me on four wheels;
this is how I remembered her,
and I want things to stay that way.
I mean, a distant relationship,
occasional visits from either of us,
the arrival is a sigh; the staying a fuss;
the departure is a tear;
the tear is one-sided, heart-shaped,
like a plum, a pear,
coming down my chest like a spear,
but as you say, I am glad to let her go.
That’s how our relationship has endured
the tensions of touch from each other,
the confessions of love, the lip-sucking,
the pantomime, like water humming,
not boiling, not burning the pot into ash;
there’s the pressure to catch a fleeting wind,
like a ship past a safe harbour, past anchor,
sailing, sailing, like the hair of a feather,
lulling towards the ground, towards rest.

Midlife Crisis

Beneath the veneer of my father’s silence,
which weighs on me like a granite stone,
was a man with a voice full of ants,
though he has too many words in his mouth.
They metamorphose into ranting insects,
each alphabet struggling to possess his tongue
or pluck it out if they cannot have their way.
The quivering flames of life burn in the dark
and the wind shifts it towards its angle
but death hangs around in the bow of the sky
and the brightest light vanishes before dawn.
It’s not surprising that men as old as my father
die in their sleep, their words stuck on their graves
as the things they cannot say to trees.
A trumpet sitting on the anvil of the wind,
he has much tears to shed for the living,
and after that, there will be stillness.
Often, I feel that he smells of anger
at his loss of a thousand years and one,
but seeing him sink empty and worn
makes me think he regrets the years
in the amber of air in Port Harcourt
pursuing something he cannot have.
What’s a man to live for in a crisis
if he will not die for his dreams,
when they smell of the perfume of salvation?
And how else will he ever know
what straddles his brows on the day of his end,
if he doesn’t come to the end of the rope
where the cliff is like a provocative lady,
naked, demure and alluring to the core?
My mother christens it a midlife crisis
for a man to yearn after things of his dream,
when age has run away from him with wings,
and he dawdles along in wounded feet and ankles.
Who could spend eternity with a holy woman
without the smear of dreams teasing his mouth?
Without memories deep enough for a river,
it’s suicidal to swim through life on bended knees,
and there is no need to settle for a loaf
which the larvae destroyed and desecrated,
because we’re desperate to have the skin of a leopard.

Modern Childhood

It’s not the collapse of my adulthood
that still bothers me,
nor the stones that lie on my body
while I’m lifeless on the ground;
it’s not the absence of a motivation to stand up
and offend the miracles on the way to my rescue.
Sometimes dreams hurry to get fulfilled,
though it’s not their place to bring about their perfection.
I have seen this under the sun,
and realised that there is no mockery of time
after I found a hole in my body
where the version of my childhood should have been.
It still irks me how I became a man
without going through the stages of childhood,
and now I’m orchestrated to live through adulthood
reliving the dream things of a child.
I follow my mother around like her ankles,
drag my wife and children to live with my parents,
having lived alone throughout my childhood.
I visit clubs, partying till daybreak
while my wife and children wait for my return at home;
I keep late nights, yet excuse myself from my parents,
and forget about my family that died for me.
At seventy-five years, many men buy coffins,
and graveyards and portions of land for their heads,
where their bodies would serve sweet flowers,
but all I think about is how to cripple my neighbour
and sleep with his beautiful wife a thousand times a day.
My body is as lusty as a young gazelle,
sometimes, I flow like a new river
where seven oceans dread to empty themselves.
It was my younger sister who warned me
against meddling in things kept for the gods,
after consuming the biscuits and the Fanta bottle
which penitents offered to their gods for atonement.
and which I decided to write about;
it’s the washing away of my childhood
like soft sand on a violent shore.
Surprisingly, I jumped a stage in my growth
and landed at this age with my eyes open,
where I’m a child without childhood,
or a man without the things of manhood.

A Journey’s End

The first day, I slapped and kicked her;
it was the beginning of the end of our love.
Nothing else I did made meaning to her;
like when I sliced off my healthy lungs
to buy her a visceral valley of gold;
or when I sold my black blood
to buy her a winged limousine.
I climbed up the peak of Zuma Mountain
and God answered all her prayers.
Should I mention the sky over the Niger,
with pimpled surfaces like pebbles,
yet she couldn’t revive her love for me
but rails against my efforts for a change.
How unchanged her hurt heart drove
all of her body to tantrums and distress,
and in the end, forced her to declare,
this journey is over for you and me.
Two days later, her decomposed body
lay like a sterile slab in a hospital morgue.
Cause of death: exhaustion and drought.

Remission

When the sky wakes from its midnight death,
it glares its torchlight at the prostrating me,
where the wind has dumped my withering body
and leaves me to die with a horde of scars.
I know I have emptied my lake of grace;
I know I do not deserve a pebble of a smile;
every harsh blink of the scorching sun,
or every tossing around of the thorny clouds
is a sharp needle poked into the bones of my heart,
and I shall lie dead, the pawn of the merciless time.

But wherever I lie is the spin of the world
which escapes the fraud of the heart and the soul.
Every man exerts an uncertain revenge and scars
but will never know how it will turn around.
The rain falls on my head like baptism water
while I suck its refreshing fragrance;
roses and lilies tease my fragmented parts,
building together what is asunder.
I heard the distant scent of an oncoming rain,
my body twitches; my soul rejoices.

An involuntary commotion sets in motion
that forces me to spring to my feet again.
Though I have fallen below the depths of return,
the night passing by is the day’s metamorphosis,
I can stand again with this blistering smile.
All the while, my enemies hired a removal truck
to cart away my body from the face of the sun,
and erase my name from the archives of life.
Now I know how stubborn and resilient grace can be,
when, without a curse, the guiltless suffer abuse.