Anatomy of My Grief Coming to Me First as a Hissing Thing

By Nnadi Samuel

how not to say father does it better than a snake,

how he folds his tongue to kill a dialect.

I do not make my facts boring here,

I hold a sweetener as I knead these words 

into something long enough to keep me sighing all my life.

& you might want to know how I found my voice in this poem,

what I did when words return void, as the hole in my throat.

forgive me if I do not impress, when I say I crawled back & did nothing to live.

in our block, i'm stopped as a consonant:

a rankshift between plosive & flaps.

I wish for living things to know me first as sound—which means in good health,

which means placing the worth of a sibilant before me. 

my father trains his mouth to yawning,

the pink reptile in there is nobody's plaything.

liquid worship to God—we make anti-venoms this way, 

bathing prayer into our red loins,

mopping his teeth for bitemarks.

fangs that break my breath,

& pours me into rupture.

whatever knew us knew a diphthong,

knew the Siamese of two.

my father, deviating from the norm,

sounding like a mood when he yawns to feed his reptile with words.

sometimes, he milks his tongue,

& spills the venom on our plush.

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Nnadi Samuel (he/him) is a Black writer & graduate of English & literature from the University of Benin. He reads for U-Right Magazine.