Blood Moon
 The gap chewable between dawn & dusk is  carnivorous than its vomit:
 half man, making shapeshift seem a pleasant chore.
 dark meets us as torn carcass, skin-searching our violent heredity.
 all cuticle hatching perilous pink, when night breeds our wolflike gene.
 the angst of charcoal flesh,
 hawking wild flint across the delicate blue of half eaten melancholy.
 what's the youngness of my drowning?
 more psychiatric lads, boy-cotting tough therapy.
 girls reeking of stabbed semen & self-pollution, as grief climaxes.
 we weather the wet,
 famished as an aspect of a blood moon raging through our transparent bodies.
 the year sours on a lime branch urging me to space— apish.
 the glides in here is reckless physics.
 gravity, anting over our wishbones.
 my mechanical feet colors with sound & loud debate
 on what thirst brings me to such new world,
 chalked by a hopping desire to cheat the sky & retain the milk.
 In the ritual of naming, I am an ark braving the pattering of God's fluent wrath.
 where am I?  where is my consent in all of this, reoccurring like a motif?
 the howls we bear, too news for print.
 the cloud, colorfast with voices going their third round on our black skin stripped bare,
 & the hour consist of just two complexions.


 Noun, at Rest & in Motion
 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. a 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.


 Pantoum with Blood Exits
 [1]
 There are doors conceived solely by me.
 these doors stomachs the happening of other doors.
 [2]
 adulting would make you fill a room,
 before your hands reach for the more expansive version of yourself.
 before you're capable of just the right symmetry to hold shape.
 your body, growing bigger & louder & squarer.
 blood, held at warm degree.
 [3]
 all outlet has a skin for repeated maths.
 I'm of rough bisects, yanked from a vein diagram.
 should a line parallel to my wrist feel like anastomosis?
 [4]
 the wirings are everywhere we've leaked from.
 I can be a door till I'm not.
 till proven otherwise.
 [5]
 I wield no knife through myself to emanate.
 the rare sugar in self-slaughter is absorbing the "honey"
 cooed by shocked spouse, manning our bedside.
 [6]
 the universe seem only a beehive from my stung self.
 no one inherits this sweetness— grief undefiled
 [7]
 as doors come first as a prison item,
 before they're any good.
 [8]
 whatever is without boundary breeds crime:
 a synonym for lawlessness.
 I write my body into a whole pantuom of rules,
 to navigate this world tape-measured by God's arm.
 [9]
 palm italics— where grief eats the lifelines from our skin,
 leaving a deadbeat of meatball.
 [10]
 all attempts at mobility, chewed & carefully forgotten.
 numb as my stung self.
 I'm guilty of this stagnancy.
 [11]
 My thought, like doors dreams bump into,
 aimless as a stray.
 the poem takes a U-turn.
 I content myself with what's littered here:
 [12]
 I haven't mastered blood in all my bargings.

Author’s Biography

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, Quarterly West, Blood Orange Review, Uncanny Magazine, PORT Magazine, The Cordite Poetry Review, Gordon Square Review, Rough Cut press, Trampset, Beestung Magazine, Rigorous Magazine, Blue Nib journal, Stonecrop Review, Kaleidescope Magazine, The Elephant Magazine, Birmingham Arts Journal, Lunaris Review, Inverse Journal, Canyon Voices, Journal Nine, Liquid Imagination, Silver Blade Journal, Star*Line Science Fiction & Poetry, Zoetic Press, Subterranean blue poetry, The Quills, Eunoia Review & elsewhere. Winner of the Canadian Open Drawer contest 2020. He won the Splendor of Dawn Poetry Contest April 2020, won the Bkpw Poetry Workshop Contest 2021, 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. 

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