Olentangy River, 2019
“Olentangy River, 2019” by Akhim Yuseff Cabey is the winner of the 2024 Rising Poet Prize for emerging poets, selected by Morgan Parker. We’re honored to share this enthralling poem with you.
“It was a tough choice, but I picked this poem because of the way it balances narrative mystery and vivid imagery through careful pacing and thoughtful line breaks. I loved how the couplet form accentuated the poem’s earnest grappling with difference and otherness.” —Morgan Parker, Guest Judge
My soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness
and my mouth shall praise thee as with joyful lips.
–Psalm 63: 5
envy dark men who’ve traveled
from derelict parts of the city
where children ride giant dogs
as if horseback and weep
infrequently the death
of small things—
just to fish this historic
water, where local authorities
that winter found the black
girl’s frozen corpse. later
identified. no evidence. no
motive—no nothing.
they arrive by public bus,
tackle in one hand, battered
pole in the other. I sat next to one
once: corroded teeth
but forearms taut from the pull
or some past toil.
they were familiar pilgrims
to me at twenty-three,
a recent migrant to this Ohio
capitol from New York City harbor—
leather jacket collar popped,
vanilla bean essential oil
in the armpits. I will never be
him, I thought, pleasure
then only the chance to elicit
from the naked girl
the sacred half moan,
half cry, half gasp, an odd divvying
to which I was addicted; but
a righteous pursuit, I believed,
that separated these ghetto anglers
from the sleek, slick cat
I was trying to be. parallel,
for example, is the pure winter
air and tongues
somehow scolded by cold tea.
or somewhere, too, a boy-baby
feeds on his mother’s breast
while the man he’s destined to be
is stabbed to death in an alley
two blocks over. because lie
and truth have been made to coexist
soon we all begin to look
the same: the killers, the killed.
god bless, then, the poisonous
carp these fishermen toss
back into the river,
colluding to catch and release
the same time next week. my first
lost tooth I knew these men
were mine. and though I don’t fish,
in my mind I go with them—
the ones from parts of the city
where children gather
beneath street signs and sacrifice
limbs before chanting them
back into existence—
to our part of the Olentangy.
together we forgo
the baited hook, instead beckon
at the rippled face of the water
for the day’s catch to reveal themselves
and—
tell us
the story
of how, of why
her body
came to be
there.