Topher Allen

Body Count

I should warn the men I sleep with
about my lips, when puckered, 
they resemble the muzzle of a machine gun. 

The hickeys I leave are bullet wounds.  
I know this because all my lovers bleed out  
after leaving my bed. 

Mark didn’t make it through the door,  
he went cold in my arms.  
Dave passed out at the steering wheel,  

mowed down a stop sign  
and lodged in a gully. No one noticed  
the crash scene until morning.  

His wife was on the news, her eyes recessed
like two urns sinking into soaked earth. 

Body Count

I keep finding myself on the floor  
s p r a w l e d  
like blackness across a burnt cane field, 
like a flight of synchronized crows. 

It’s my lovers, they don’t stay, 
they mistake me for a door, a thing  
you pass through or kick in.

I try calling out to God, but you see, 
only men with guns come  
through me, 
so much that I remain in constant wait
to be kicked in. 

So I resolve, the next time I crash
to the ground, I will no longer be wood 
but glass, a bottle of rum
with a flaming wick in my mouth.

Topher Allen is a poet and short story writer from Jamaica. His writing explores themes of grief, mental health and Jamaica's cultural and historical experiences. He is an Obsidian Foundation Fellow whose work appears in Montreal Writes, Magma, adda, Poetry London, Pree, Ambit and elsewhere. He won the Poet Laureate of Jamaica: Louise Bennett-Coverley Prize for Poetry in 2019 and the Obsidian Arvon Prize in 2020. Topher was shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry Prize, Bocas Emerging Writers Fellowship and the BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Award for Writers in the Caribbean in 2022. He is also the founder of Eminent Poets of the Caribbean Foundation (EPOC).