Jonathan Chibuike Ukah is a Pushcart-nominated poet living in the United Kingdom with his family. His poems have been featured in Atticus Review, Unleash Lit, Written Tales, Propel Magazine, Clockhouse, and elsewhere. He won the Alexander Pope Poetry Award in 2023 and the Editor’s Choice Poetry Award in 2024.
Don’t stand still. Act as if there’s no tomorrow. Fly, cross rivers and seas, walk across foreign lands, and make the places you name become real before time moves on...
Smoke is named and narrowed—neither bushfire nor city blaze—rising toward a dry sky as vultures pass, magnolias scorch, and clouds receive what fire leaves behind.
After rage against the sky and stars, love is reconsidered as sound, loss, and a change that refuses to hold or arrive the same way twice.
He walks alone on the thorny road with an oak fallen across his path, hearing waves behind him and water raging close by where thunder once cracked through the mountains.
In the dark of a grave, he hits the coffin roof and calls out, everything around him turning to ash as a single flower opens its dying scent toward the...