Kemi Alabi
Kemi Alabi is the author of Against Heaven (Graywolf Press, 2022), selected by Claudia Rankine as winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award. The collection was a Kate Tufts Discovery Award finalist, Chicago Review of Books Award winner, and one of New York Public Library’s Best Books of 2022, among other honors. Alabi’s poems have appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation, Poetry, Boston Review, the Grammy-nominated album Difficult Grace, and elsewhere.
Alabi is co-editor of The Echoing Ida Collection (Feminist Press, 2021), an anthology of Black reproductive justice writing. They’ve spent over a decade building narrative power for trans and queer bodily autonomy, most recently as Head of Creativity & Impact of the reproductive justice organization Forward Together. Alabi is the 2024-2025 Feminist in Residence at Northwestern University and Beloit Poetry Journal’s Inaugural Iron Mouth Curatorial Fellow. Born in Wisconsin on a Sunday in July, they now live in Chicago, IL.
Poetry by Kemi Alabi
Beloved, last night I doused us in good bourbon,
struck a match between our teeth, slid the lit head
lip to chest, throat zippered open and spilling.
Our union demands a sacrifice. Take my masks—
my wretched, immaculate children. Sharp smiles
bored by cavities. Braids thick with hair slashed off
lovers as they slept.
yusef says this morning makes us the oldest song in any god’s throat. i dress this on a new love whose fingers dissolve time, who plumes me into a whole choir, reconstructs her mouth to fit the worship. but nightdreams call me a liar, show only your face. my blood tides to the timbre of your voice and nothing else.