Nnadi Samuel
ANATOMY OF MY GRIEF COMING TO ME FIRST AS A HISSING THING
how not to say father does it better than a snake,
how he folds his tongue to kill a dialect.
I do not make my facts boring here,
I hold a sweetener as I knead these words
into something long enough to keep me sighing all my life.
& you might want to know how I found my voice in this poem,
what I did when words return void, as the hole in my throat.
forgive me if I do not impress, when I say I crawled back & did nothing to live.
in our block, i'm stopped as a consonant.
a rankshift between plosive & flaps.
I wish for living things to know me first as sound— which means in good health,
which means placing the worth of a sibilant before me.
my father trains his mouth to yawning,
the pink reptile in there is nobody's plaything.
liquid worship to God— we make anti-venoms this way,
bathing prayer into our red loins,
mopping his teeth for bitemarks.
fangs that break my breath,
& pours me to rupture.
whatever knew us knew a diphthong,
knew the Siamese of two.
my father, deviating from the norm,
sounding like a mood when he yawns to feed his reptile with words.
sometimes, he milks his tongue,
& spills the venom on our plush.
WE HAPPENED AS EXCLAMATIONS!
"born with a siren & the wailing of each other" — Anthony Anaxagoru
It's scribbled in our meet,
shorthand elusive as what gathers here.
once upon a jargon, our lips anguish in all the wrongful tense
grammared for our wailing.
ghost pauses & spit punctuations splayed in their beaded white, like untouched drafts.
time scores every pitch.
the noise we shed— buoyant with hashtags.
the white barricade of canine tooth thwarting our wild attempts on a protest.
a hog weeps.
our lids, heavied with the artless wet,
& the filed lashes jut as though a stylus—touch sensitive,
spilling mild nyctography across the blind alley
to the guttural street, grooved by all our harsh consonants verbed to-be:
meaning, to seize any decent information from us
you'd grab & hold on tight, while we sift in our different forms—
modelling after such Is, was & am slimier than all my first tense.
nothing bridges time if it's not past perfect here.
our acts were born finite, inflective as new slides.
should a grief we go through drag along as "present continuous?"
redemption is colored joy everywhere,
so the stain treats our night as discoloring agent.
the hour between dusk & dawn— mergeable as a noun phrase.
Boys diabetic at it, as gloom thins their sugary thoughts to moderation.
*
I body a war quick to play victim
yet, proved a bellicist.
"Whose corpse triggers this?" I stretch,
tape-measured by a slashed plank:
em dashes that nails me to resting.
nothing is without sharp ends, even in the grave.
many a time, we happen as exclamation.
more harmed than surprise.
I am emphatic with this outcry!
a grammar of tall stain.
how armed, we've patrolled language,
like a bullet mealed it's trademark on all our letters— blood spaced
by the weight of a crime scene.
"what font size do corpse keep?" I ask my plump self.
In a miss, thermal sky recedes stealthy as a bypass tray.
aerial jamming of turquoise white spanged in wasteful ceremony.
a phrase quells its heat.
glistening salt from typewriter pore, mirroring skin baptism.
In the night beyond letters,
the heart bares itself of meaning— how wildly we chase fluency,
running out of things to say.
*
It occurs moronic as a job hunt, where I observe dumb dialogue.
the recent graduate in our third flat, making all her needs look like minimal pairs:
a want of gloom & groom,
& a bit of grief to outwit her tear gland.
cursive wailing leaning near punctuation mark, absorbent as a needle.
blood, puddling at word prick as if summoned.
we scream through the sharp task,
biting on nothing but wind.
out there, an effeminate child ask if 'boy' is a state of mind,
but I'm of a certain sex in what seems the last gendering left to us.
the parrots can't relate how often we co-exist with just two vernaculars:
gloom & grief— milked from their core speakers, graduates & wordmongers.
raw dialect remixed, so how we lose rhythm is how we sorrow in the loss.
sadness once here, now stripped of intent.
we've known hurt as a first slang: a ruffled vernacular,
filling the orbits of our throats.
BLOOD MOON
The gap chewable between dawn & dusk is carnivorous than its vomit:
half man, making shapeshift seem a pleasant chore.
dark meets us as torn carcass, skin-searching our violent heredity.
all cuticle hatching perilous pink, when night breeds our wolflike gene.
the angst of charcoal flesh,
hawking wild flint across the delicate blue of half eaten melancholy.
what's the youngness of my drowning?
more psychiatric lads, boy-cotting tough therapy.
girls reeking of stabbed semen & self-pollution, as grief climaxes.
we weather the wet,
famished as an aspect of a blood moon raging through our transparent bodies.
the year sours on a lime branch urging me to space— apish.
the glides in here is reckless physics.
gravity, anting over our wishbones.
my mechanical feet colors with sound & loud debate
on what thirst brings me to such new world,
chalked by a hopping desire to cheat the sky & retain the milk.
In the ritual of naming, I am an ark braving the pattering of God's fluent wrath.
where am I? where is my consent in all of this, reoccurring like a motif?
the howls we bear, too news for print.
the cloud, colorfast with voices going their third round on our black skin stripped bare,
& the hour consist of just two complexions.