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Breath & Shadow

Fall 2024 - Vol. 21, Issue 2

"Boy of Incoherence"

written by

Nnadi Samuel

On transit, a girl fetches her hand from the side of her body,

                                                & shoves it into my mouth to know what lakes in its abyss.

meets it scoured clean of sound. an untorn language floating on the surface.

                                                I chew around a carcass of grudge these days.

whatever I hold with an effort to feed, loses its life before the gnawing.

                                                I renege on table manners to have my meat crawling

on its ten pincers: a lobstered gathering.

                                                I masticate, & the oil brushes a song on my throat like a thrush.

I bless this vocal minute with a stutter.

                                                we cast our tongue like nets, till a mud pool is a crab away

from going extinct. when a dentist visits, I hide the burial spot on my tongue:

                                                place where finches & finches have toiled my larynx,

wheeled my breath with their wings to sustain a flapping/ɾ/ that is near baritone.

I home a carnage of sighs & bird in the affluence.

                                                I eat the music of my speech & swear I haven’t tasted it before.

the pelicans bear me witness.

                                                sadness is not my genre. just another art past its prime:

when I grieve, I reach for a fat sign to hold my suffering

                                                & label it with twin slash: a houses phonation.

the bone-chilled wave of silence, hitting the floor of my body.

                                                I wear a cold feet to a dialogue made of coal & turn red with accent.

I am surrounded by native speakers chasing after me, to put me out.

                                                I lay waste to air, to arrive at a blur:

all smoke, yet no fire burning in me. Boy of incoherence:

                                                “ask him to tie a sentence, & he uses the syntax to tie his breath.”

we think in asphyxiation & speak in lack of sour stuff.

                                                witness the dying on page: a standing ovation of letters to the boy

who shows up breathless & without grace,

                                                who drags his lifeless body up the stairs of his dreams;

who leaks a monopthong by laying flat.

                                                I wrestle with the birds & eat a quiet meal from the ground.

feather my lungs with laughter  a dialect picks me up & dresses me in a loud way.

                                                I trek a shouting distance towards disrepair: a walking outburst.

They had to put a pipe on me, to suck up meaning from the blast of sound.

                                                I make this one sense, & I am exhausted as reed, fluting a tempo at killer pace. I sit back, to catch my tongue latching at a catchphrase.

                                                Sorry, I am a thing of repetition. I use a word till it runs out of shine & polish my teeth with its cawing. I am complicit with gibberish. I bring it bone-close jaw.

So, at the mention of incoherence, I would be found knifing the air in sign language.

Nnadi Samuel (he/him/his) is a black writer. He holds a BA in English & Literature from the University of Benin. Author of "Nature Knows A Little About Slave Trade" selected by Sundress Publications. A 3x Best of the Net and 7x Pushcart Prize nominee. He is a first year MFA poet at the University of Virginia. His third micro-chapbook "Biblical Invasion, BC" is forthcoming at Bywords Publication (Ottawa CA) in 2024. He tweets at @Samuelsamba10.

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