poem

by Ókólí Stephen Nonso

Alabama

As kids, we used to think America was in the sky,

a place airplane pierced like prayers,

where streets floated

and hunger dissolved midair.

I arrived instead on ground that holds its weight,

where dreams touch earth

before they rise.

Alabama was my first name for America,

spoken slowly,

like a bruise tested with a finger.

Magnolias stood, polite and unbothered,

history sweating through white columns,

the past sitting beside me on the bus.

I carried my life in a careful silence,

papers folded

like instructions for survival.

Burns insult the body,

teaching the skin what it cannot forget.

I knew something of fire,

how it tutors memory into staying.

In Birmingham, the air knew pain,

songs shaped inside clenched teeth.

Church bells rang as witnesses,

and the ground remembered feet that ran,

and others that never could.

I learned America is not in the sky.

It is a body,

scarred, breathing, unfinished.

It asks what you will carry,

what you will name.

In Alabama, I learned to stand still

and let the land

say my name back to me.

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Ókólí Stephen Nonso (he/him) is a Nigerian writer and a graduate student at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Indianapolis Review, Feral Journal, Adelaide Literary Magazine, Brittle Paper, The Shallow Tales Review, Olney Magazine, Tuck Magazine, and Ofi Press, among others. He is the 2024 winner of the Muse Journal Award for Best Literary Artist of the Year. His other honors include first runner-up in the Fresh Voice Foundation Poetry Contest and third prize in the Akuko Magazine Inaugural Prize for Poetry (2021). In 2024, he was also shortlisted for the Akachi Chukwuemeka Prize for Literature. He is also the recipient of the 2025 English Department Achievement Scholarship Award at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. In recognition of his growing literary impact, he was profiled in Who’s Who of Emerging Writers 2021 by Sweetycat Press. Say hello on X @OkoliStephen7.