Bio
Daniel Naawenkangua Abukuri (he/him) is a Black poet and prose writer from Ghana. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Transition Magazine, The Malahat Review, Colorado Review, North American Review, Mantis (Stanford), Chestnut Review, Orion Magazine, Berkeley Poetry Review, Protean Magazine, Minyan Magazine, and elsewhere. He is a nominee for the Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, the BREW Poetry Award, and the 2026 Caine Prize. He is the first-place winner of the African Writers Award (Poetry), the winner of Poetry Archive Now! Wordview 2025, a finalist for the 2025 Adinkra Poetry Prize, runner-up for the 2026 Cambridge Poetry Prize, and was longlisted for the Renard Press Poetry Prize. He is an Obsidian Foundation Fellow alum and was featured in the Obsidian Foundation Showcase with The Poetry Society.
Daniel Naawenkangua Abukuri
Fourth of July, Giving Men Roses
for Carlos
brother of the lit match
& soft petal, you arrive
in a country rehearsing thunder,
flags cracking open the sky.
you press a stem into a man's hand,
thorn speaking before scent.
he does not know where to place it,
this quiet instruction in tenderness.
fireworks argue their brief empires
over rooftops, red bursting into red,
while you insist on another language,
a bloom against the habit of hardness.
this offering that asks him to hold
what wilts, what bruises, what lives
only if it is not clenched too tight.