A Town this gorgeous once held Rust
- Jul 28, 2023
- 2 min read
by Nnadi Samuel
A town this gorgeous once held rust. I offer myself as a vista for how war is perceived. the scaffolding with teenage lamp, spreading incense — the way a pope’s lung stretches over a church of Psalm.
I gaze past the bloodied notes. look what tarnishes this grassland: metal feel of rugged light, perishing the way a crayon self-destructs on the cardboard of doubt
of name & buttoned landmines. of bloated promises — inked in wasteful ceremony. & when moonlight spills tincture of rain in blood-soft clay, the earth blossoms with drowning.
still, I trudge the West Coast to witness corpses unspooling from cemetery like ripe bait starched to each other, tomb, splayed wide open as capsule that stomachs a cold-blooded loin.
In the heat of discovery, a boy blooms from rot; stabbed fresh. & on styling his dagger-bright fist, he makes a knifing remark:
I prize this as language for slaughter. out here, a coyote wolf down rumpled carcass & levitate past grief. I chase its lame figure, ‘let this shadow leak finely into dust.’
red challis of burnt fabrics scolding the wind — the way loss tackles mayhem, the way savagery takes shape in our veins.
a wreckage clings tightly to straws of light. I palm the ruin & it bleeds a flicker.
when a moth fledges from the inferno I christen the loss, because whatever pass through flame ends with ash.
the heat grasp it by the wing — tearing its naked sting, as they race midflight. see how ghastly, muscle wounds air in a bid to outrace dying.
a bullet race in my direction: denounce your boyhood.
I wish to break ties with gender to ascertain I’m all bone & nothing else. yet, language fails me repeatedly. empty of sound, my loin toughens. tongue, stitched into a bone-clean slate.
I debone late soil & still, a boy blooms from the havoc, styles his wrist into a dagger — knifing a sobbing gold out of rust.
Nnadi Samuel (he/him/his) holds a B.A in English & literature from the University of Benin. He is the author of Nature knows a little about Slave Trade selected by Tate.N.Oquendo (Sundress Publication, 2023). A 3x Best of the Net, and 7x Pushcart Nominee, he won the River Heron Editor’s Prize 2022, Bronze prize for the Creative Future Writer’s Award 2022, UK London and recently won the Virginia Tech Center for Refugee, Migrants & Displacement Studies Annual Award, 2023.
