2025 Hurt & Healing Prize THIRD PLACE WINNER: “Seer” By Akhim Yuseff Cabey

By Akhim Yuseff Cabey | July 30, 2025

Frontier Poetry is excited to congratulate Robert Wood Lynn’s pick for the THIRD PLACE winner of the 2025 Hurt & Healing Prize: “SEER” by Akhim Yuseff Cabey.

“Neither civilized reason nor Christian love would cause [anyone] to treat you as they presumably wanted to be treated; only the fear of your power to retaliate would cause them to do that, or to seem to do it, which was (and is) good enough.”

— “Letter from a Region in My Mind” James Baldwin

What’s striking and masterful about Akhim Yuseff Cabey’s poem is its audacity of voice: confident, cutting, and almost disconcertingly precocious. “SEER” captures how neglect produces the type of social cannibalism where rage, competition, and even graffiti become tools to enact control.

Read his poem below.

SEER

it was easy enough to steal the tag-name of a random boy

who’d graffitied it all over the middle-school that year I turned thirteen

and decided to hate god. and why? because I’d discovered my folks—

and too many others spread out over the dense grid of the city—

had been burning their faces off after heating and inhaling purchased

rock. but you should’ve seen this four-letter fucking thing, sleek

as an ape flexing its biceps for onlookers in the plexiglass partition

of his captivity. had I a mind not so filled with plumes of suffocating rage

I could’ve conjured a pseudonym all my own. entered into it

like water the arid throats of the addicted. but I was just a boy

born to dream of razors imbedded throughout the guts of bubblegum

just so I could wake chewing to hate god. I was owed the alias—

at least this—so perfected its egotistical script and autographed

all the same places the boy had been before me and once the ass

of a bougie girl’s knockoff Jordache jeans. the artist confronted me

one day but couldn’t prove I wasn’t him, and neither could I

by then. I’d stripped him of his skin, packed bits of it into my pipe

of hatred and held its hot tip to my lips. keep it, nigga, I give up

he said in the breathless tone of a boy who wants but is far too tired

to kill. I pushed him, then, into a deep hole in the earth

where falling echoes of purity go to die. don’t feel bad for him:

it was his own fault for failing to end the signature of his rebirth

with more impregnable flare capable of preventing the sad little fuck

of a boy that I was from ending his life with mere forgery.

Akhim Yuseff Cabey

A Pushcart Prize-winning Black author, AKHIM YUSEFF CABEY’s work has appeared in Colorado Review, RHINO, The Florida Review, Shenandoah, Indiana Review, The Sun Magazine, TriQuarterly, Callaloo, and elsewhere. He is originally from the Bronx, NY, and now lives in Columbus, Ohio. Get Funky, Get Swoll, his full-length debut collection of poetry, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in 2026. He can be found on Instagram @the_fit_poet.