I run out of ways to keep you urgent in my mouth,

stomach your shouting relic.

so, when grief comes for an unburial unearthing you into the forgotten,

I stuff you under my tongue.

 

how I’ve learnt to carry you across borders,

across turnpikes & racial diss.

across the panting roadblocks,

where we exist loudly as exclamations below a cop’s knee,

or viscous ransack that gets close but doesn’t claim my throat.

 

the near miss—a hurt we alone can voice.

 

I scale you across walls, unpronounced.

pawn all my sound rates at eager cost, to house your absence.

the mold of your breath: a memory of all the things we run out of.

till I approach the wild reserve of oxygen & grim soil yawning to mouth you

whose hunger surrounds a place, kill its aura

knowing an opening isn’t reception.

 

you go by the names of every fattened contraband,

nurtured by my silence,

plump with a knowing of all I’ve held back.

 

I genuflect, teeth heavy into dust

to sow your person in a sullied language.

I drown your absence deep in the carnivorous mud:

a wreckful planting of small pockets of thirst.

 

the sky—grief hefty.

wrathful cherubs, laced in giant heaps of puffed cloud.

each turn, a weeping threat.

 

I howl into wetness till the ground goes soft,

loamy with my passing breath & the trail of your absence I indent with shrubs.

each thicket, a bleed and scything remark scribbled in furious red

across the tiny mouths of the world

 

as I hold you urgent, behind clenched lips.

a sharp susurration tilling its underbrush.

 

how likely we assume dust,

by which I mean—slit our tongue into sones & decibels.

a throbbing loudness seething from within:

an hour of sobbing gold.

 

(Editors’ Note: “A Wreckful Planting of Small Pockets of Thirst” is read by Matt Peters on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, 45B.)

 

© 2022 Nnadi Samuel