Nkechi Ebubedike, Cloud Collage VI (detail), featured in AGNI 104
Almost Aubade—In Which the Lover Does Not See Dawn
December 4, 1969—4:30 a.m.—Chicago, Ill.
a poem like this can only happen on the south side
where the air is panther-pressed and black.
the sun, the color of phlegm-clumped marigolds
in the throne of the throat, is long gone.
the poem wants you to know the apartment
they shared held a kitchen in which they ate
and fed: cornbread and sun-set fried chicken,
the collards lush and endless. you are aware, i’m sure,
of how soul food foreshadows the poem’s end. the last
supper, arteries unclogged and blood unleashed. fred alive
no more on the damp mattress. (not sex wet but body-opened
wet). maybe he slept through the raid, unreachable
in his slumber. deborah, with child and without child’s
father, climbs out of bed. the soul rises. the messiah does not.
Porsha Olayiwola
Porsha Olayiwola is the author of i shimmer sometimes, too (Button Poetry, 2019). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in TriQuarterly, Black Warrior Review, AGNI, The Boston Globe, Essence, and elsewhere. She served as Boston’s third poet laureate, from 2019 to 2025; was an Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellow; is an Individual World Poetry Slam Champion; founded the Roxbury Poetry Festival; and has been an artist-in-residence at Brown University and at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Assistant professor of poetry at Emerson College and cofounder of the literary gathering space and bookstore JustBook-ish, she writes, lives, and loves in Boston. (updated 10/2026)