By Chiwenite Onyekwelu

Drunk as fuck is the way you climb
fastest towards God. A religion

of glass. We’re outside your room
& you are outside your body

which, somehow, is a kind of room.
Every time you fall you claim the

floor is a miracle worth dancing to.
I find you childlike. I find you

weightless, alive, like a man on the
roadside sitting on his head.

Only an hour ago, we were adults
with grief in our hearts. I still

am one— standing here, thinking
about my late father, thinking

what if like him I wake up someday,
unconscious, half my organs

drowning in blood. But you call me
towards the merciful beer. Drink,

you say, let alcohol wash your soul
clean. I was a man full of doubt,

now I believe. Omniscient glass.
Fragile god of the table church.

I kneel, a sacrificial lamb, pleading
that you make a mouth out of me.

There is a man dancing in the light.
There’s light dancing inside a man.

Such miracle—not the man but the way
he burns, almost beautiful, almost ruined.

Chiwenite Onyekwelu is a Nigerian poet and guitarist. His works have appeared in Cincinnati Review, Rattle, Adroit Journal, Hudson Review, Terrain.org, Chestnut Review, and elsewhere. He won the 2024 After the End Poetry Prize organized at Oxford University as well as Prism International’s Pacific Spirit Poetry Contest. He was also shortlisted for the 2024 Bridport Prize and has been a finalist for the Alpine Fellowship Prize as well as the winner of Hudson Review’s inaugural Frederick Morgan Poetry Prize. Chiwenite holds a Bachelor of Pharmacy (B. Pharm) from Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Nigeria.