Carrying My Father’s Silence

by Nnadi Samuel

Metin Ozer

how warm you chew your tongue into disremembering the taste of a dialect. grief, the calm to soften your teeth, & sponge a weak phrase to its neat wall of pink.

this is how you kill a mother’s worth: sludged wrists crushed to calories, lost from ceaseless count of meals by how much her darkness shortchanges you.

your lips ramming into each other.

you braid your head into a migraine, & let the style eat you.

silence like mohawk, stands at ease.

getting my attention is one tough chore,

you could break your lips, & still not get the dry sound to pulse me.

all my fun sides staked to claims: that I feigned my father’s accent, & sighs are how he make words look like sin.

I am sifting into this new world, skipping my meals, becoming what I eat when I starve things of my lips.

I now lust for days when noise grooms my stature, tongue amplified with the thirst for a crazy accent — this dialect that should know me.

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Nnadi Samuel is a black writer and graduate of English and literature from the University of Benin. His works have been previously published in Suburban Review, Seventh Wave Magazine, North Dakota Quarterly, PORT Magazine, The Cordite Poetry Review, Gordon Square Review, Rough Cut press, Rigorous Magazine, Blue Nib journal, Stonecrop Review, The Elephant Magazine, Liquid Imagination, Eunoia Review and elsewhere. He won the Canadian Open Drawer contest 2020. He won the Splendor of Dawn Poetry Contest April 2020, got shortlisted in the annual Poet’s Choice award & was the second-prize winner of the EOPP 2019 contest. He was also longlisted for the NSPP 2020 prize and nominated for a Pushcart. He is the author of Reopening of Wounds. He reads for U-Right Magazine. He tweets @Samuelsamba10.