NNADI SAMUEL - POEMS

Nnadi Samuel holds a B.A in English & literature from the University of Benin. His works have been previously published in Suburban Review, Seventh Wave Magazine, North Dakota Quarterly, PORT Magazine, The Cordite Poetry Review, Gordon Square Review, Rough Cut press, Trampset, Rigorous Magazine, Blue Nib journal, Stonecrop Review, The Elephant Magazine, Lunaris Review, Inverse Journal, Canyon Voices, The Collidescope, Journal Nine, Liquid Imagination, Subterranean blue poetry, The Quills, Eunoia Review & elsewhere. He won the Canadian Open Drawer contest 2020. He won the Splendor of Dawn Poetry Contest April 2020, got shortlisted in the annual Poet's Choice award & was the second-prize winner of the EOPP 2019 contest. A longlist of the NSPP 2020 prize, & Pushcart Nominee. He is the author of "Reopening of Wounds" & "Subject Lessons" (forthcoming). He reads for U-Right Magazine. He tweets @Samuelsamba10.

​Hope for a blind Cartographer

​I begged to be a radio station, but here i am-- a signature tune.
a thumb pressed to my bone, i know an ink when it holds watery depth.
i know my downfall as i know a fact,
& choose when to put all hit tracks of my life on repeat.
 
this is not an interview, i have featured on life's track before.
fleshed things that has made loss so significant it was mistaken for grief,
& i never relented in airing it as a gift,
as my father when he says he'll be back before sunrise, but we never get to see him.
 
as the tap when it vomits it's last lyric,
before running out of breath like a trash poet.
as a candle when it islands into a bath tub before stamping out,
before the accident that claimed the darker part of me.
 
before i chewed a firework to make me blush.
i didn't die, i was only lucky to have survived the blackout.
until this moment, flesh knew no colours.
everything here attest to the fact that a bracelet pressed to the wrist of a black man is slave trade.
 
so i bear this mark for justice & our greed, knowing it cost a mother to afford this body.
knowing the earth only rewinds where the universe can skip us as bonus tracks.
nothing holds more scarcity than a breaking news,
but where i come from we make headlines this way, without first rehearsing the scripts.
i guess it all starts with owning up to my faults,
knowing i listen to my idiot box so often i crack the best of my rib.
 
it almost feels like my neighbor's curse words to know how my darkness returns.
but, what is there to be afraid of?
what if i am part of this darkness & the light in here wouldn't just flicker.?
my mother should have a remedy for this.
 
i think myself a blind cartographer mapping out plans for the world.
no, this is not jumanji,
not even superpowers can rid us out of this.
 
most times, i flash through these moments,
to live in another timezone & see my father stranded.
his shirt bruised to the storm, with his head wearing a basin of dust.
he seemed without troubles
& i loved him for all that he carried as wind.
 
my darkness claims me now,
to resemble my father's ego foregoing boundaries,
like demons foregoing the howls of the people they possess.
i owe no one an explanation as to how i feel right now-- a villain in my own story,
with a badass plot in a world sick as this.
my sister got so sick of me & passed the night lonely.
a century was my death wish, but i guess I'll live past this too.
 
my father-- a tree breathing in the middle of nowhere,
sometimes, he stings like my shadow,
& most days unsheathes him like a sore with a room for fainting.
he made me who i am today-- a blind cartographer stealing lumens to bake my sight.
 
the stars blared inside of me is a tincture,
i carry it for the doubt making airwaves in my sister's bones.
 
 

A Room with faulty Memories
​

​In a room where there is no excuse for dying in a blackout,
i warm the night with vallium & tuck my body into the belly of a candle.
only late-nights & a colourful crusade scares this body far away from it's grief.
before now, everything claws so much like a stranded ghost,
& the holes here are too small not to swallow their howls.
 
I tax my breath for the last hurricane that blent my brother.
there are so many bills to pay for affording a luxury in a body that stinks like an house chore.
i plait my broken spine into a book that bends to survive every day on my shelve.
this is how i know my dreams in hardcovers, in sutures & just poetry.
 
pain reshuffle my bloodline,
to know that i have a father who sits with the night to monitor God's heart beats.
a brother who sells his body for pleasure & watery semen,
a cousin whose gloom roars into her thigh & dyes her body with blood & thunder,
a sister whose shadows fosters grief in me more than my mother,
a mother who soils the air with screams & her empty shadow--
the walls only survives her cancer in tears & tiny beads of sweat.
 
I am not proud to call them names.
i live my life picking light rubbles from the sky,
that alone should leave the night with a severe heartburn.
 
in between my fingernail is a spacing cauldron that hangs everything.
i watch as my mother's body hibernate,
like a video game trapped in a room with faulty memories.
her skin do not weave into a fancy mascot.
 
i draw near to catch a glimpse;
to know how it feels like for a body to be talented with hard luck.
her smile oiled her pores, & she threaded her pube into a brand new wick.
 
 

Portrait of a  Mother & her son glistened on a paring knife
​

​nothing adjusts this body into mental focus,
than been caught in a trance--
a wild stain of blotted images blurring into my scalp.
i called a mother in there "mad!" & she sweet-tongued me into her past.
i held her hands, too scared of the dark,
blood gurgling down the crevices i call home.
 
i toned mad-- a nun's cassock mopping the air with prayer.
my nails of transparent beauty,
another glass to mirror my undoing.
 
i think of that last blade filing it,
a blunt knife unsheathing the most of my furs,
till it becomes like naked sin: a surname bruised on me.
 
the cloud above the cosmetic store lies in cross-dressing.
nature shops there like too much of bad luck--
boys warming their loins,
girls wearing dreads shaved off a grey mop that tangles
or combing will rid it off it's style.
 
 
a lump of days circumvents through clime,
with all it's bareness gushing into the mouth of space.
 
little things brings this planet to it's knees.
same breath it took to house my brother's death,
is same breath it takes to scare this thought away,
& watch tiny beads of sweat string into a forum,
soothing as a casual debate doused on my father's back to toughen his loin.
 
i made this same mistake healing my country.
too many things holds me dear to bear the risk of taking in a paring knife.
i see my mother skinning herself,
& her loins slaving along my paring knife and it's little blunt of ray.
 
 

​Mantra for the Boy hailing a mother that wasn't so full of Grace

​I melt a rosary that stings like virgin Mary to scold her,
a woman learning not to become my mother,
with a keen appetite for unforgiving--
like my father dying by a paring knife in a meal accident.
 
in fairness, my father owned a garage to his thoughts.
it harbored so much, & unpacked into the lawn of a neighbouring store.
we traced this scar to the sleeve of an open space,
where mushrooms filter into the woods as dusk.
 
my mother in the paws of the night weaves her colorful brown skin into a knifing sofa,
drowned in the belly of dust--
blood & water barging through each other,
for all of it's watery seizure to handle her boy child to sleep.
 
in her quiet moment unrobing her rude verses,
her skin necks blu--
a brief commitment with the stretchmarks dyeing her tissue in white & native hue.
 
wounded to her back, we identify as stars & moons stripped off her breast,
rare breeds to offend this world with our familiar glory.
 
for those death i didn't die, i rubbed her shadow on my skin.
so, when i run out of darkness,
i stamp my whole body out, knowing there is a street light in heaven,
& i carry a portion of it's weak lens.
 
even the pet with a meowing sound do not know my mother enough to catwalk into a hole,
folding a runway with her feet.
 
many things drinks into her youth.
sizing her up,
you would know what doesn't drown her leaves her thirstier that she was.