when we learned of his body dashed onto a doorframe,
the yeast of a wound bedazzled by light.
eyelids, caved in between—small as a skylark
knife-peeled & brine soaked in saltwater made sweat.
his impetuous, bloodstream: all that fuels Minnesota’s temper veining through,
as if hoping to catch a glimpse of him.
I opt-out of the binary & the boldness shivers dusk, how cold berates a child.
how a lightning stammers in the hands of a cop,
learning to quench his flame on an effeminate child.
Fifteen saw me chased by a pistol-mouth from a grown-up spot—guessed into green,
to mix with the wet clay & other soluble denominators of my kind.
Archimedes’ Principle states: ‘a body immersed in water,
experiences an upthrust equal to the weight of the fluid displaced.’
& I wade without sink—pummeling my right arm.
say, a violence thrust upward, is the whole loin arriving headfirst.
& with this pump action, an object bullets through the wind:
a boy is firearm or skylark, with less than a way to tell which is what.
the cop don’t tell me apart from the wet clay,
& blunders his way through darkness.
I flatten into a punishment—enough to bear the world’s weight.
a boy is satellite stabbed onto a pie chart.
a planet lived on its own.
a boy is meteor, going extinct with each body that eats fire.
Click here to read Nnadi Samuel on the origin of the poem.
Image: photo by ev on Unsplash, licensed under CC 2.0.
- Pump Action - April 17, 2024