My father stared at me like a rose full of lint.
He was wondering how living haunted me,
spreading through my face and body,
how it serenaded me like a black shadow,
this slice of stench, this mound of nausea.
I told him that I would get married to her,
the love of my life, the lint of my universe,
the one whose smile cracked Heaven open,
the only woman whose carcass cleaned me.
When she lived, my parents hated her;
my mother believed she had no home training;
my father thought she did not look like me.
How a wife must look like her husband shocked me,
and he knew we were unrelated in any way.
He asked me to show him a mirror
in which I was a yellow sun on a dark wall.
Put it on your face, my father said with tobacco-teeth
Who do you notice in that mirror?
I had never seen my hair turn gold in the mirror before.
I thought that my father turned into a thunderstorm.
Love is not necessary in marriage, he said;
it is the opposite of marriage, chastising peace.
When love lives, marriage dies in you;
but after the death of love, marriage will live.
When Margaret died in a car accident last week,
tears in my eyes, I asked, can I marry her now?

Jonathan Chibuike Ukah is a Pushcart-nominated poet living in the United Kingdom. His poems have been featured in Pangyrus Lit, The Pierian, Propel Magazine, Atticus Review, The Journal of Undiscovered Poets, and elsewhere. He won the third Prize in the Voices of Lincoln Poetry Contest in 2024 and the Alexander Pope Poetry Award in 2023. He was the Editor’s Choice Prize Winner of Unleash Lit in 2024. He was the Second Poetry Prize Winner at the Streetlight Poetry Prize in 2024 and Winner of the Poet of the Month December-January 2025 at the Literary Shark Poetry Contest.