[Unknown]

Unknown

lapping.

Unknown

playing

with beach

balls by the

pool.

Unknown

swinging a

hula-hoop.

Unknown

Marco!

Unknown

spread like

an angel on

the grass.

Unknown

eating

corn dogs.

Unknown

drinking

lemonade.

Unknown

Polo!

Unknown

stripping.

Unknown

strip of

trees.

Unknown

lining the

street.

Unknown

strip of

houses.

Unknown

bell in the

earth.

Unknown

stroke of a

clapper.

Unknown

swimming

through the

dark.

Unknown

bones in

the dark.

Ninety-five

Unknowns

to be

precise.

Unknown

at the mass

grave

marked

unknown

ninety-five

times. One,

near

unreconiz-

able, is

believed to

be female.

The others:

Ninety-four

men or

boys.

Unknown

discovered.

The Central

Unit prison.

Electric

chair. You

could see

chain-

gangs

across the

road as

early as

2007.

Unknown

grackling

power

lines.

Unknown

sinking

the head.

Unknown

watching

the children

watch

them. Is

this

haunting?

In the

abandoned

prison.

What they

look for.

Super-

natural

sighting. To

exist or not.

A figure

no longer

figurative.

As if to say

body and

body

appears. 

 

Kyle Okeke is a writer from Sugar Land, Texas, whose work has appeared in Poetry, Narrative Magazine, and The Sewanee Review, among other literary journals. He was awarded the Evaristo Prize in African Poetry and the Poetry Society of America Chapbook fellowship. He is pursuing an MFA in creative writing at University of Texas at Austin’s New Writers Project.