The After the End team would like to thank all the poets who entered the After the End poetry competition for their interest in the competition and project. It was a tough selection process with 270 entries from 13 countries of powerful, moving poetry that brought a breadth of interpretations to the themes of the project.
We are delighted to present below a selection of poetry from the winner and runners up.

Chiwenite Onyekwelu
Chiwenite Onyekwelu is a Nigerian poet and pharmacist. His works have appeared in Hudson Review, Rattle, Cincinnati Review, Adroit, Terrain.org, Chestnut Review, ONLY POEMS, Ubwali Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. He was shortlisted for the 2024 Bridport Poetry Prize. He also won the 2023 Hudson Review's Frederick Morgan Poetry Prize and was a finalist for both the Writivism Poetry Prize as well as the Alpine Fellowship Prize for Poetry. Chiwenite has a Bachelor of Pharmacy (B. Pharm) from Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Nigeria.

Rhiya Pau
Rhiya Pau’s debut collection, Routes (Arachne Press, 2022), commemorates fifty years since her family arrived in the UK, chronicling the migratory history of her ancestors and navigating the conflicts of identity that arise within the East African-Indian diaspora. Routes was awarded an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 2022. Rhiya won the Creative Future Writers' Award in 2021 and her poem Salutation was highly commended in the 2023 Forward Prize. She is one half of ORIGINS Poetry Duo, who write and perform collective poetry that does away with “ownership” and “linearity” to decentralise and decolonise the traditional project of history.

Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi
Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi, Frontier I, is a Nigerian-Hausa multidisciplinary artist, poet, and Medical Laboratory Scientist from Bobi. She is the author of Cadaver of Red Roses O, Miami Books) won the 2024 Derricotte/Eady Chapbook Prize, winner of the inaugural Folorunsho Editor’s Poetry Prize 2023, Labari Poetry Prize 2023, the inaugural Akachi Chukwuemeka Prize for Literature 2023, and Gimba Suleiman Hassan Gimba ESQ Poetry Prize, 2022 and the first beneficiary of Carolyn Micklem Scholarship. Her works appeared or were forthcoming in Strange Horizons, FIYAH, Uncanny Magazine, Poetry Daily, Agbowo, Poetry Wales, Torch Literary Arts, Utopia Science Fiction Magazine, Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. Her second chapbook, Uncensored Snapshots, is forthcoming with Chestnut Review (2025). She is active on X and Bluesky @ZainabBobi.

Chiwenite Onyekwelu - On Memory and Forgetting

for my father

Memories are slipping away from his mind.
He does not even know that I know:

His struggle with the little things. The other
day, for instance, he began a story

about the Biafra war & then forgets.
A blur where a riffle should be. A what-is-

it-called? where instead there should be
a soldier shooting at a boy. But

I remember the story, this one about
the soldier, about a cold hand tightened

around a trigger while my father ran,
surviving, afterward, what was a bullet

aimed for his back. Some days we talk
about other things. Like his love for roasted

corn. The times he’d smuggle corns
to school, & chewed them, he said, while

other children played at the field.
I am marveled by the sheer favoritism

of the human mind. How, sometimes
as we age, the brain chooses which

memories to keep & which to dispose.
On his deathbed, the Dutch painter

Vincent van Gogh talked about sadness
as if it were something breathing,

something he must take with him.
Decades of life & there a dot. I wonder 

what it is I would recall. What book,
what emotion, what good sex, what angina,

what memory will color my mind when
it’s time to leave? My father tells me

the story again– the one about corn.
& I pretend as though we have never

walked down this familiar road. You
should have seen the joy in his face,

my God, the joy in his tired face.

  ________________________________________

Chiwenite Onyekwelu - Time/ Our Time

                      “Oil spills may kill around 16,000 infants
in the Niger Delta annually within their first
month of life”
- Business & Human Rights Resource Centre

                       “An estimated 240,000 barrels of crude oil
are spilled in the Niger Delta every year…  
               releasing toxic chemicals into the air.”
– The Guardian

Wreckage, like an hourglass, can be
a tool for
measurement of time. It's November

& I walk into the city where I grew
my first 
tooth. Everything is burning down:

The chrysanthemums & the trees. The
farmlands & the
crops they hold. Even the river where,

as kids, we learned to dive, headfirst,
into the soft yawn
of the tides. In the pediatric clinic at

Ogoniland, I sit beside a boy who is
now a ruin,
& I am convinced that the human body

too is a unit of time. Look how he
ticks away,
slowly, each breath heavy, like sand-

paper grinding out a wood. In the news,
the government
promises to Clean up the oil spills &

put an end to the pollution. Just like that.
My god. How
terribly they miss the point. Healing

is more than just the absence of a wound.
& who says–
tells me, who says– a wound ceases to

exist when you pull out the blade? My
people have
been hurt in unimaginable ways. At

the pharmacy down the road, a woman
describes the thick
yellow sputum from her child. Asks

What does it mean What does it mean?
I am afraid
that time, for her, is even slower. Like  

a nail ramming through a stone. Oh,
the inertia 
of the nail. Elsewhere, another child & 

then another. Still, I think about our
environment
before the oil. How wonderful it must

have been: my people, the seabirds
returning,
in flocks, to scoop freshwater into their

beaks, the eels' silvery glow & the crabs,
dancing,
toward their sandy homes. We had all

the time in the world but now we have
none. Now we
drag, slowly, like a leg nursing a bruise.

Go ahead oh nimble world, my people
will arrive.
They will arrive whenever they heal.

________________________________________

Zaynab Ilyasu Bobi - The Final Words of a Stage-IV Cancer Patient to Cancer Cells

You know, the crazy thing is, I feel ok.

& yes, you have won the battle. I'm finally at peace.

Now, we sit & watch us die.

  ________________________________________

Zaynab Ilyasu Bobi - a new era

of grace—an aftermath, a future.

there is nobody chasing bodies into death.

the sky is busy shining, bright,

at the olive trees seated in the soil,

pregnant, with bloodless water

running through their veins

rather than housing airstrikes

or phosphorus air. every path

leads back to the river and the sea.

and from between is a journey

not blighted by catastrophes.

in every home, the family portraits, poised

on the wall, are faces bursting out laughter

into the windpipe of the rooms—

love and peace and freedom and freedom

breathe musk in every corner.

outside the window, the sun rays,

wrapped around the children

dances to the songs of the new era.

and every child eats bread out of their parents

hands—each line of the palm conjoining to grace.

and in a loud voice, the land keeps echoing,

grace lives here, lives here

—on the soil, the-e soil,

where the watermelon re-grows.

…ter- -melon grows.

  ________________________________________

Zaynab Ilyasu Bobi - a spade isn't just a spade

Hausa proverbs: ruwan daya duke ka shine ruwa & idan dare yayi dare buzuzu ma nama ne

even as a white lie, i know not to call rub & shine

a bath. & i will not squeeze the sponge

that doesn't give more than it takes. for my truth,

i will only call the water that flogged

my skin water. how can i cover what night

hasn’t sheltered? what has lie & numbness

get to do with poetry. what truth did i forget

to speak? a garden has more to offer

to a spade than my black body. if still in doubt,

use it to flense a whale’s skin

& see if the whale heals. the art of survival

isn't the art of hurting.

at night in the mid of nowhere, i will not hurt

a bug to satisfy my hunger.

& i will not give you a reason to call me a spade

while every part of the whale still hurts.

________________________________________

Rhia Pau - Enough

My grandmother houses Gods in her closet among tower blocks
of cereal boxes and canned chickpeas so we may always know enough.

She stews landscapes with the windows closed, wills the extractor fan
to take her home. Generations drift, climbing ladders that raise you

as an only child. Language limps ashamed in the mouth, we fill silence
with sakar and gleaming jewels of pomegranate. Love is a miner’s purple hands

for we have lost the words for indigo and magenta – lust and rage are faded
characters. At the margins I find her, at the Post Office queuing for stamps,

returning lyrics to the radio, songs of abundance heard on the static,
some place even she has forgotten. Lord, how do I cross this abyss?

We did not brave the seas, sever the limb of belonging for this.
To whom can I confess: I am grateful but this is not enough.

Bring me the raags. Bring me the mirrored, midnight ghoomar.
Bring me qawwali under the heat of the marigold sun.

‘Enough’ won the Platinum Poetry Prize in 2021 Creative Future Writers’ Award and was first published in their corresponding anthology ‘Essential’

_______________________________________