by Nnadi Samuel

At the Health Center, A Woman Claims My Grief

Nerves glitch on the inside, & it goes haywire in my head.
a faint blackout. a mosaic of red before the white flusters.
the nurse halves an escitalopram on my palm.
says, a tablet will unmake me.
in her distraction, I dust the medicinal rhetoric off my sleeves.
ever been accused of a murder that stinks strongly like you?
how your bullet-shaped torso jerks as if a firearm.
we are victims of our own sugar rush.
a trigger-happy boy wounds his arm into a rifle & empties it on his body.
calls it amnesia. I forget its last name, disremember what it means to live,
to still have breath stuck in your lungs.
when a thought pops up, I must wade through the skin of the skull to hold
it down lest it dissolves. I trauma in liquid that needs a cupped hand beside it
to gather the overwrought waters. I drink my speech as hasty medicine.
the syrup of sound, rubbed upon the stutter.
a shiny bald sigh oozing out of my tongue, as if fresh clean from a haircut. 
a woman claims the grief from the balcony, says her son hasn’t sighed in months.
she would need all the decibels she can muster.
I perform a mouth joke & the door opens,
stage myself out there where the breeze can gnaw me to an instrument:
a Frisbee for long throwing.
I land on apartments & make no noise.
do not worry about me. I have never been brave enough to make one anyways.
when I reach for my doorknob, the sensor alarms me in light, till I am red with living.
I blood my feet on the pavement before going in. I do not stain the air with my loss.

Grief Playlist

A day chooses not to be written about,
& mops the glass of my memory with snow.
I try my shoes on & the price of a taxi unlaces it—
the way the number on the app shapeshifts out of my budget.

I am debited for attempt, for taunting a ride & canceling it die minute.
when the receipt comes in papered form it reads “The charges of reluctance”.
I am so reckless with my hesitation,
I put a life on the line for it, race a mileage on Cleveland Street to catch a bus of Orange line.

we arrive at a paid corner. someone uses a plastic on the door
& it opens without stress:

I want to be as accessible as this, something of easy open.
we take the stairs down, where the music is the loudest,
where the blacks express their blackness in cutthroat songs.

I reach for a sizeable tray & make my presence known in all dishes,
spoon a buttered lyric into my throat: my invention of word salad.
a meat insists on my teeth & would not let go.

I hold a toothpick to the occasion & go canine by bone-stuck molar in sorting out particles.
from the audience, someone utters my name in full,
& I knew a Nigerian had a hand in the calling.

I am dragged on stage – toothpick in mouth to stepdance in all the ways that charms the floor:
a shuffling of bare feet. grief playlist on repeat.
our hearts, attuned to a wild frequency.

the legwork is unresolved question on staccato ground
an uproar rises from the note, toning the airwaves with jazz.
how she makes breakdance seem a walk in the park.
we watch our hunger break boundaries.

her arms curved in mine, soon as the playlist drops.
we sit adjacent to each other & share the burden of a pillar,
share a trauma that begs the syllabus.
a chunk of fish, catching on my throat like a pendant.

protein has a way with sadness, the way it dresses the neck with so much oil.
the wheezing of the air conditioner, frying our eardrums.
we’re approached by forks teething on a bland cake.

we “hurray” into breathlessness. a bird calls at my address.
I take the road chalked by a sigh—down the gullet of the night.

Nnadi Samuel(he/him/his) is a writer of poetry. His works has been featured in the Sable Books Disability Anthology “The Ending Hasn’t Happened Yet” Edited by Hannah Soyer & elsewhere. He was also a guest-reader for the neuro divergent Workshop/ Project titled “Where World Meet Skin: The Embodied Poem” guest-edited also by Hannah Soyer. He is the author of ‘Nature knows a little about Slave Trade’ selected by Tate.N.Oquendo (Sundress Publication, 2023).