JK Anowe

künstlerroman

i miss my last train
of thought back
to you

fugitive
ricketing furiously
into the future

the mind’s
ever-invented-&-reinvented
peradventures

had i
the howl-range
to reach you
& beckon you
back—

have i
learnt nothing
of thought’s late
arrival—

my long
waiting left
among the black
& white terminals
of reasoning

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JK Anowe (he/him/they) is an Igbo-born, multigenre literary artist and an MFA+MA candidate in poetry at the Litowitz Creative Writing Program at Northwestern University. Anowe has served as an assistant poetry editor at The Nation and currently serves as interviews editor for 20.35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry. He is the author of the poetry chapbook Sky Raining Fists (Madhouse Press, 2019), and his poems have appeared in The Chicago Reader, Gulf Coast, Palette Poetry, and elsewhere. A 2023 Gwendolyn M. Carter Fellow in African Studies at Northwestern University and a 2025 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow, Anowe lives, teaches, and writes from somewhere in Chicago.