A revelation hits home & we're poured out of blessed leaflets,
tossed onto the medicated morning.
here, I am grape wizard, perched above baobab
to confess high school males into scampering.
the skirt pulled halfway is unfinished business.
blooded lavatory cupping hormones in wasteful spillage.
the punchlines of teenagers laced with antiseptic vowels, whitewashing brick walls.
castrated metaphors, broken over virgin slate—
the kind to kill you on the spot.
darkness is a manner of language.
Christ: a solemn voice note in the lexicon of grief.
my wrist, twisted into a yarn unbraids the fertile lessons from a root word.
I bed the miracle with bare hands stitching meaning into uniforms.
in the caged light, I praise the wind for this naked privilege,
& air short-circuits round my lung.
the missionaries hoard bookworms & make monks out of philosophers.
they debunk Christ, registering their displeasure in raised armpits & archaic slangs.
rummaging a thesaurus for synonyms—in the hungry custom of a poet:
I need my palms splay-footed, bending the
same way into every alive sheet.
knuckles: half-rounded as broken walnut.
I ghost into whitening to achieve surveillance:
the neat burden of teenagers making toy guns off their fist,
as they empty themselves into sound—echo by re-echo.
forehead, graced with the rifle stink of moral decadence.
femme lips, locked in mouth-to-mouth resuscitation,
while I bullet past the divide of leaves
till nature yields an olive branch.
Nnadi Samuel
Nnadi Samuel (he/him/his) holds a B.A in English & literature from the University of Benin. Author of 'Nature knows a little about Slave Trade' selected by Tate N. Oquendo (Sundress Publication, 2023). A 3x Best of the Net, and 7x Pushcart Nominee. He won the River Heron Editor's Prize 2022, Bronze prize for the Creative Future Writer's Award 2022, UK London, the Betsy Colquitt Poetry Annual Award, 2022 (Texas Christian University), the Virginia Tech Center for Refugee, Migrants & Displacement Studies Annual Award, 2023, the 2023 Stacy Doris Memorial Award (Fourteen Hills) San Francisco State University Review, the John Newlove Poetry Annual Awards (Ottawa, Canada), 2023 and recently won the Vera Manuel Poetry Awards, 2023 Surrey Muse Art Society (Vancouver, Canada). His third chapbook is forthcoming @Bywords Publication (Ottawa CA) in 2024.
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