Estrella House Publishing

Nnadi Samuel

Language is raw persimmon,
& the permission of teeth wrapped against its yellowed sweetness.

here, I am—jaw ajar before my windowsill, licking a phrase to its seeded white. my gum, redolent with bees, you’d mistake me for a humming
knelt against the tight throat of cloud
stretching above a bushy existence that is me without a haircut.

in my open-mouthed plea, I gnaw a fiber thick stain of sound.
a blooded sigh, streaming from its fleshy exterior: an agape feeding of my reptile tongue. everything on earth demands a swallow that leaves one begging to be quenched:
the grappling of neck, a failed gymnastics—useless at first try.

my barrenness begs to train a garden of stone fruits, to harden my resemblance towards life.
their squeezable blessing of mouth-watery vitamins, chowed in rushed silence.

I volley the seed out of my breastbone & it lands on a skin of glass: a loudness planted in amorphous solid.

I cross-pollinate into breaking. the crack of my spine, a stigma shaped like a U-turn.
a curved rage, lengthy on transparent surface.

see, how I bold letters into chaos theory,
yet cannot pronounce my joy in hollowed fonts.

I milk a deciduous tooth on the black architecture of the night sky. my childhood squats in its ravenous light, housing an internal bleed.

I own a silence that curls on the inside like adult wisdom, & do not grow a body to elongate into shouting.

in my echo, I commit a spit to memory,
relish the infant white on the walls of my gullet. I foam with a cheerfulness that is near-diabetic.
know of any happiness that is healthy & without medication?

I roam the wild of my organs, practicing woolgathering with a sheep’s leftover fleece. in a daydream, my mother clots without help from a bite that has my name on it,
& I wonder how I ghost between countries, stinging my relatives.
 
I tremor in slimy water coming from my raised head: a call to attention that elicits running— a helter-skelter of ‘help-me’.
my pity party outfit—a shiny scale of keratin.

the hotness of summer, honing a bright language on my ribs. I strain a cold distance to wean off this hissing costume,
tie a towel of flesh on both ends of me & peg a bone to the exercise. I think ecdysis, as if sun-drying my better half.

I own this moment like a stolen body, this shiny black bag of terror. its presence on my back—a battle to be dragged everywhere,
in spite of the hemorrhage in my lung.