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Loic Ekinga
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the poet
Loic Ekinga is a writer from the Democratic Republic of Congo. He's the author of poetry collection How To Wake A Butterfly, and has had his works of fiction and poetry appear in Agbowò, Tint Journal, Type/Cast, Salamander Ink, Ja. Magazine, Poetry Potion, A Long House, New Contrast, Brittle Paper and elsewhere. Loic's experimental mini chapbook, Twelve Things You Failed at As A Man Today, earned him an honourable mention by J K Anowe for Praxis Magazine. A finalist of Poetry Africa’s Slam Jam competition, Loic is also a Kasala writer and teacher, and Best of the Net nominee.
the poems
For Black Boy
The black boy—still unfurling, puts his hand over his mouth and weeps.
Be a man, we were just joking!
Years later, a black boy he knew is said to stand at the entrance of the city—on a motorcycle, looking to feed his black children. Another black boy, the pointy-eared black boy, digs black holes with his black bare hands for anyone willing to pay for water. Another makes music and blames his infidelity on black pain. What happens after you climb a mountain and find no ram caught in a thicket? Years before, around the time the black boy—unfurling, wept into his hands -- they kicked balls on the golden sands of his grandparents’ street until Black God stroked the sky purple. They laughed into each other’s day and rubbed leaves against their black skins until they could taste the trees. There was a time, the night/black was the only thing worth fearing. There was a time when to live too long meant to die. The boys, now, stand on their blood every morning trying to be men, crying into their hands behind walls, away from their fathers' eyes.
Nausea (ii)
This must be what it’s like to chase
someone's love to the edge of the self:
The groaning, the longing, the dancing
At the precipice.
The men who taught me love, taught me injury
What happens in the body should stay in the body
I open my chest, the pulp– the despair
Someone, somewhere talks to a friend about me
And says he was never a bad person,
He was just never in love with me
The first rainbow appeared out of regret. I apologise.
I multiply. In my apartment, the ants
are everywhere. So is the moss. I fall in love and
everything aches. How do I say the tragedy meant
to end me is growing teeth, without sounding like
a poet in reverie?
Because there are conversations too uncomfortable
For even God, I wonder whether we will ever talk about
this body and His plans
What is the name of our disease?
The men who taught me care, almost starved my mother
to death. You tell me,
How do I open my mouth into a woman’s without
my grandfather marching down her throat?
Do you see what ails me? What do our people call it?
And for God’s sake, what is it with the longing?
No One Is Writing
Love Poems
About Me
I say to her— out of nowhere, in a crowded bar,
before she brings her mouth so close we eat the night
Then I remembered that she had on my favourite T-shirt
—black, polyester … two sprays of my cologne
behind each ear. She glitters—gold
rings within
rings within
rings
In the hallway of my apartment building,
she pushes me against the wall
& proceeds to swallow the night whole
Publishing credits
All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb