such is my flowery adjective
scissored wrong.
jagged morphemes:
I chop you out from them, to tough citations.
for proof, I chase scriptures into your vast portrait.
your lids of equal signs, housing round slogans— like they were motivation enough to
live.
I leap from this adjective.
the thought, a proper noun in motion:
“where boy + rope= a soon to be breathless body.”
perception is suicide in arithmetic.
grief— a brief determinant in the equation that sums to joy.
happiness is a natural but fine contradiction running into space.
the void between rise & sunset, day & midday, anti and post meridian.
I sculpt you in my own time.
for proof, I drive nuts into plywood,
lay you down. noun at rest:
“where boy + sleep= eternity”
here, my thoughts synonymous to a dumpster zipping your odd body & sieving the even
details.
upturned, you lie vacant as a space in the human race.
I leap from this emptiness.
at first blab, I speak grief too well for someone of my stature.
my room, which I fill before my body wears the raw version of itself.
raw being volatile, numb
to vanishing.
think of me as a bound morpheme, sticky to my root cause if perception was phonics.
sound, traveling to hug void. sorrow left in its trail.
I crave this wandering of a boy on a heartless wind.
think of me as God’s palm stretching to limit.
all turbulence, here & gone.
Nnadi Samuel
Nnadi Samuel (he/his/him) is a Black writer & graduate of English & literature from the University of Benin. His works have been previously published in Suburban Review, Seventh Wave Magazine, North Dakota Quarterly, Quarterly West, Blood Orange Review, Uncanny Magazine, PORT Magazine, The Cordite Poetry Review, Gordon Square Review, Rough Cut press, Trampset, Beestung Magazine, Stonecrop Review, Kaleidescoped Magazine, The Elephant Magazine, Birmingham Arts Journal, Liquid Imagination & elsewhere. Winner of the Miracle Monocle Award for Ambitious Student Writers 2021 & Canadian Open Drawer contest 2020. He is the author of “Reopening of Wounds” & “Subject Lessons” (forthcoming). He reads for U-Right Magazine. He tweets @Samuelsamba10
Photo by Hans-Peter Gauster on Unsplash