“Pixelated Bodies” and Other Poems

By Nnadi Samuel

Pixelated Bodies

"May God have a photograph of this" - Ilya Kaminsky

I was first taught the art of blurring,

seated on the gone imprints of a vanishing spray.

the tide, wiping off a history of leaves.

in spite of caution, something is left behind to ruin how it must—

the way the West seeks us into vanishing, & would not do a clean job at it.

the evidence still soft & breathing.

imagine you are the last thing to draw breath in a lodge once peopled with laughter.

as you lie there, toiling the soil of your breast for heartbeat.

imagine you as the stain on a family album that goes unnoticed.

your facial print blurring under intense light.

I have raised toddlers who cannot point me out in hard copy,

except for the bruise suffering my knees.

each year, a coyote bleeds half-dead on our wet sand—

abandoning tremor in its trail,

& the sea keeps washing ashore like we do not have bodies to cater for.

I thank the posture of you as you are: witness to all of these mayhems.

I've lost count of the number of times a house fell into me—unpronounced.

the debris of cement, memorizing me later as a headstone.

you say 'bismillah' in quick succession,

& you're only reciting all the kinder ways

to give the incidence a name twice its size.

I shudder at the thought of living as fickle as any last prayer my lungs can hold,

bare as my pronoun dropped face-first on the pavement.

do you stand a witness to it?

the darkness everywhere now started from a blind spot,

then a faint light, then this blackout swallowing us whole.

for harm to be made visible, one needs to silence whatever sparkles around.

the retina created for more than

all the luminance our vision sells the camera that draws blood from the scene.

you capture a moment here only by capturing all blacks.

I hope that when you do, you do it for the right course.

thank be the way you stayed still.

thank be your awkward posture—on the fence, while I film this evidence.

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Grief as a Sharp Language Threading through Us

Today, I wander far enough—till I'm witness to a Volkswagen ramming

into the signpost that un-alives a robber, as he dashes for the road.

the rough impact, uprooting him midair onto the hardground,

as though he weighed less than his story. As if

this godless charade is all hard breath & costume.

in the wake of this event, my hands are plastered to yours.

which explains why I had witnessed the tremor, short circuit

round the walls of my brother's body & rushed like the next sigh

greeting the floor was his moan—tarnished into a last breath.

like the next object to fall would be his shadow before the robber's.

as a girl shreds her uniform & sprints into the highway

to secure safety over the tattered loin.

her arms: flagged into a halt.

I go knee-deep into the crisis, making a barricade of my jacket.

red, stewing out of a gash in his midriff—gutted with blood.

I shove a thumb towards the loamy-soft skin of his chest

searching for heartbeat, & it came back to me in traumas of light.

I query his darkness & the bile spills up the vein, wrecking his bloodstream.

at the rough bend, cars ululate their grievances.

& throttling on—approach us at slow pace.

once, as a teenager in Red Cross, I envisioned the needle as a sharp

language—threading through my veins to witness blood wear a map over our loin.

bliss, carving out from a country of wound.

life, as we know speeds one way,

till a scenario sheds so much light—it turns into accident.

on sighting an ambulance, I sidestep grief to meet my brother

gazing from a legible distance.

his mind, thrown against the lack of silence.

& I starfish my palm, to feign innocence.

I reach for his hands: torn wild with trembling,

and say 'hold me, even when it is inconvenient.'

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Male Privilege

I settle into smoke pipe, debating how we wear our boy badge wrongly.

a slaughter calls, & we participate in knives

while our better halves argue through the chiming of boiled water,

simmered hot for breakfast.

I fog my loin with blood, to raise the motion:

that a horn stuck to my wrist isn't weakness.

tomorrow, I would beg to fleece a ram

& end where the knife unmakes a heartbeat:

our lungs, softening into prayer.

I observe Pa balloon his breath to fatten the meat for kill.

he named it unmooring—as though my protest would wake the pulsing animal.

as if the word detener is capable of lazarusing a body.

all my life, something else laid down its existence for my survival.

I've watched noble hands beat intestine into blood meal, on a platter of fat.

in one event, a wool manifests from the throat of a tray.

with trembling, I uplift it towards the mouth that owns me, who turns down my

advance — the way you divert a blessing before seeking it out on your loin.

our men die, & the emptiness take shape in plots of land.

see, how much masculinity begs the softness of earth in spite of spade,

till a crow answer in beak and scathing fang — thirsting over the wreck of sand

the way a labrador schemes for a final snack at meat.

lease me your finest of rams,

I am teaching myself to kill without bloodstains.

I attend to each animal with chemical stunning.

the water cants up a hotter degree.

Pa's breath flattens to one last drag, before smoke cuts off his air supply.

his tricks don’t do the killing,

making him lose claim to the first gizzard as culture demands.

when meat is severed, the knife sidesteps the gall bladder: bile that it is.

I carry it in the animal of my body as male privilege.

fat collects in tinfoil & they name it mine.

I wolf down the adipose waste, obese in the afterlife—

where Pa held his breath in my name, curious for a bone-clean sound.

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Nnadi Samuel (he/him/his) 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 has works featured in Australian Poetry Journal, Australian Access Poetry, Hill Hoist Magazine, Westerly, Munster Literature, and elsewhere. He won the River Heron Editor's Prize 2022; Bronze prize for the Creative Future Writer's Award 2022, London, UK; the Betsy Colquitt Poetry Annual Award, 2022 (Texas Christian University); and the Virginia Tech Center for Refugee, Migrants & Displacement Studies Annual Award, 2023. His third chapbook is forthcoming at Bywords Publication (Ottawa CA) in 2024.

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