My Mother’s Child

Beside the utensils that groomed us amiss—
Ma forks my braid to a cornrow,
wear kitchen salt on my hormones to sugar the temper.

being comely here demands rebellion.
so, we choose instead to be fed fat for marriage.

I charcoal Ma's slender shape with hurting hands.
her image, unspooling in shaded pigment.
in place of loving my loin,
I invest in knowing how this body would turn out.

a girl ago, I witness Ma zip & unzip her breath:
a deathless exercise towards wearing a sari,
while tucking in parts of her loin eaten by henna.

Ma allows me this sight.
yet, do not grant answers to the stain stewing from my lap,
to my reason for being domesticated, while our males roam freely—without
a price tag sizing them up for purchase.

all these to say, I am still my mother's child,
aware of only what Ma approves.

I go headfirst into an hijab,
in the full glare of a long line of suitors,
skin soggy in satin that reeks of camwood.

jettison my place, at the fireside to grow a new name.
Pa, manifesting from the backyard to greet my lack of surprise.
I've lived his name to a grudge.
my palm itch in the loathing.

I wish for the warm embrace of the males sharing my bloodline.
I say this with a conviction beyond gender,
& I would be remembered as an asset.
the dollar rates, inflating my worth.

I imagine a time when the word woman would be less transactional,
& a sizeable male, in the shape of fiancé—yanks the thought off like a dress.
in our leaving, a thumb press against my chest, in search of teenage temper.
I own this bile for the crime that keeps a moustache.
this heart, incapable of words.

this is how we memorize to say 'speak',
before being spoken to.

Once Ma Took Her Destiny in Both Hands

her palm stammers light, 
erase traces of blood-stained tincture on wet palette.
the silverware of her body, uncracked.

nails, weaponed into a scalpel.
thumb, deboning a sketched image
to receive the hot palette knife—rinsed bloody from a mixture.

Ma is a fated sculptor, trained in pianos.
ended up a class tutor. 
the small of her fist, kneaded into a sigh.
she wrestles the animal of her ambitions & mat them into language.

in her youth, she spoke in drones of 'ifs',
while her verbs paced the atmosphere.
once threw a tantrum, to nag in the accent of her fed up wards.

it is a miracle, how she hasn't made a caricature of these moments in still-life painting:
tongue, a penciled red, with curvature eating into the walls of her chin—
crosshatching pain on a canvas of doubt.

she gropes the stylus & chaos beads around her fingernails
like a chorus of ice, thawed into crimson,
to put a final touch to this masterpiece.

paintbrush, shrinked blind with colors.
film of collected pigments, pooled in soggy resemblance.

I probe the stencil that captures her curve in its blossoming.
how the kill in a 'skill' is silenced, before ink touches cardboard,
before imagination clogs the fist like witch grass.

she relished the scent of twigs & maple leaf,
till she was flooded with light:
the neat burden of teenager striking her out of fantasy,
while spiraling round the loose embroidery of her dream.

bright film of burnt napalm, unstitch itself from creche brick
in the wake of her somnambulation through walls.

creativity comes to her at a cost.
talent that knew boundaries, yet didn't travel the length of the world.

instead, was made to spill off a lone street.
the weight of her career, flogged on asphalt ground.

About The Author:

Nnadi Samuel holds a B.A in English & literature from the University of Benin. 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 Angela C Mankiewicz Poetry Contest 2022, River Heron Editor’s Prize 2022, Bronze prize for the Creative Future Writer’s Award 2022, UK London, Betsy Colquitt Poetry Annual Award, 2022(Texas Christian University), and recently won the Virginia Tech Center for Refugee, Migrants & Displacement Studies Annual Award, 2023.

*Featured image by Ethan Hoover on Unsplash