Nnadi Samuel
Chaos Theory
I go gently towards the ruin, cradling a lover.
we loot the street's nominals; trying to shop for the right pronouns,
trying to out-guess all possible ways humanity has to trim us.
as I dress this manuscript, there is someone out there opting out of the binary.
my straight mother, grieving through the boy I did not bend to be.
exit was too much luxury.
yet, she mourned the boyhood I left behind so well
I picked a different nominal that defies her blessings:
anything to keep me out of her mouth.
I shoplift a noun too aggressive for her prayers.
I want her without hurt, still
when she beats her tongue, the words arrange me by bits.
I know the efficacy of vowels.
girlhood beads like soft wreckage over my skin.
each female I've known glory in the accident.
dying hits my feminine side,
and I bow under the sharp weight of inheritance— stone-cold,
& intimate with the loss.
of what use is empathy, for a world ebbing towards chaos?
at dusk, my lover and I palms the ruffled cigarette,
and flames a riot from there.
our lips, incinerating grammar.
each female I've known could outlast an uprising.
I, a pronoun this perishable.
I shouldn't be seen fragile, but for the rules governing this body.
Its mere syntax.
how I come to terms with knowing that English has my sexuality at heart
far more than the world.
binary is aging arithmetic. I attempt subtraction, and my folk calls it misfortune
befalling them in simpler terms.
they build the ruin into a protest the poem sustains a thorough gash in.
everything else stays dead.
the smoke abates. I outlast the flame, half-baked.
kitchen shout outs to all females, effeminate kids
and those risking their lungs to tear gas.
I wanted a poem without corpse.
I go gently towards the ruin, cradling a lover.
mallet and a proem in my hands.
they seek destruction and prelude:
what way to acknowledge those we lost to this.
what sobbing tragedy.
Nnadi Samuel (he/him/his) holds a B.A in English & literature from the University of Benin. His works have been previously published/forthcoming in Suburban Review, Seventh Wave Magazine, North Dakota Quarterly, Quarterly West, Fantasy Magazine, Uncanny Magazine, The Capilano Review, Contemporary Verse 2, Gutter Magazine, Agbowo, The Blue Route Magazine, The Cordite Poetry Review, Gordon Square Review, Rough Cut press, Trampset, Beestung Magazine, The Elephant Magazine, Birmingham Arts Journal & elsewhere. Winner of the Miracle Monocle Award for Ambitious Student Writers 2021(University of Louisville), Lakefly Poetry Contest 2021 (Wisconsin), the International Human Right Arts Festival Award 2021, and Canadian Open Drawer contest 2020. He got an honorable mention for the 2021 Betty L. Yu and Jin C.Yu Creative Writing Prize(College Category). He is the author of "Reopening of Wounds" & "Subject Lessons" (forthcoming). He reads for U-Right Magazine. He tweets @Samuelsamba10.