Seeking Greener Pastures in Symptoms That Fevers Me

Poetry by ​​Nnadi Samuel

in my dark moments, i am a wild night eating a blind bat whose belly button is untidy.
my silence a broken hourglass, i plot every breath & mouth into it—to create plastic suspense,
to know how echoes die in an empty room crammed with silence.
 
i sneeze my childhood into rubber toys,
a girl's anime, broken arms, a detached thigh.
i make to assemble them,
but it humpty-dumpties into a fresh past.
 
i carry my absence like the sky's white stretch marks,
& the moon holds my resemblance in the dark.
the clouds here do not stay woke if it's not an indian boy dying,
this is where i alarm myself in red.
 
nature files my fingernails into an arc where a whitlow quarantines me,
looking for the symptoms that fevers me.
the fingers are the most populated things our body ever nurtured so much,
that we sometimes forget to observe it census.
 
fate delays my visa in a world seeking greener pastures too.
 
life reshuffles my luggages,
& a century prays me into a quick recovery
​

Nnadi Samuel

Nnadi Samuel is a 21-year-old graduate of English and literature from the University of Benin, who lives in Lagos, Nigeria. His works have been previously published in Port Magazine, U-Right Magazine, Artifact magazine, Inverse Journal, Awakening Review, The Collidescope, Jams & Sand magazine and elsewhere. He won the Splendor of Dawn Poetry Contest April 2020, got shortlisted in the annual Poet's Choice writing and was the second-prize winner of the EOPP 2019 contest.