Lost Bodies of a Ruined City

& we sojourned..
human beings broadcasted into lintels of beacons, sharing a common signal with grief..
velvet palliums flaked into flints of miscarried hate..
who could have known we were paragraphs, cut off from the body of a comprehensive town..?

gradually we drifted..
a swarm of elegy, sympathized into the night that crossbreeds the breath of day..

amongst us were raped daughters blushed in tones of incarnadine..
children starched to docile skeletons, that
weren’t the backs of their mother..
offspring who knew no better comfort, than the odour of their overused umblicals..

we saw a woman concertinaed into the walls of her satin..
she was half-bent, laundering her husband’s last wish in a swamp of tears..
another grudgingly dragged the limp state of his brother, lynched to an oversized cravat..
if not for anything, to convince the universe that he too once owned siblings..

beside me was a man with a set of badly filed eyeteeth..
the only thing he ever murmured
was how his wife’s corpse was snuck away..
a young girl hassled a chunk of her father’s flesh, embalmed it in between a white serviette..
& made the mystery of cannibalism stink heavily beneath my nostrils..

the handicapped amongst us resorted
to begging for arms..
unknown to them that we were just a life support away from our suffocating catacomb..
pulverized catalogues..
clinging unto skirts of the unknown.

Dead Voices

Whoever thought we would see a barrage of snowballed apparitions..
each hugging a tuber of luggage..
some with emotions shrimped into seizures of asthma..
while others held the spinal cord of a juvenile sunray..

fog meets them with the prodigal spectacle of her cleavage..
the last dew dropped to observe the census count of their sleepless eyes..
with deflated faces..
that starched rumpled dreams..

every white house in America became a virgin canvas..
holding a synagogue of their guilt..
they saw their portraits; a den of deportees
lobbying for a one nightstand to be airborne..

you would have sworn you had once seen these same refugees..
probate into fragments of unemployment..
innocence arraigned..
& sentenced to life improvishment with hard labour..

you would have sworn you once held one of them up in pity..
smeared a brandy’s obituary on his eyebrows..
before its fumes remind you of being intoxicated..

but here we are..
grumbled into lightning,
dead voices of spirits..

Bodies in the Library

The air conditioned this institutional boneyard when we first entered..
the atmosphere was newly showered, we didn’t have to patch our nostrils with a girl’s navel..
a middle-aged man forgot his eyeballs somewhere behind a lady’s rear..
& a pile of books was what ambushed his feet..

the odour above us suddenly grew loud, and we had our own doubt in hot fresh lumps..
bodies tied to the bonnets of decaying shelf..
carcass that later became specimen for a spider’s web designs..
limbs dissected into index..
you wouldn’t even need a librarian to locate the next leaflet..

we retrieved a man’s body spiralbounded in between a shabby desk..
the middle chapters of a journal half-stuck between his jaws..
& somewhere in the last chapter, a lady was being referenced..
as if her body were a piece of detailed information, seeking confirmation..

i picked up a book & misplaced its cover in bloodshed..
pages thumbed into a tired coma..
we found the poster of a girl’s silhouette..
pleading to be admitted into the air conditioner..

my acquaintance removed a bulb from its hook..
& its flickers published a boy’s drenched corpse on our nude palms..
we buttoned him carefully in a black tarpaulin..
& begged his mother not to reduce the volumes of her breath.

Nnadi Samuel is a 20-year-old graduate of English & literature from the University of Benin. His works have been published in libretto Magazine, ACEworld Publishers, Artifact Magazine, and a piece titled “My girlfriend says she would die in a street lamp” is forthcoming in Jams & Sand Magazine. If he is not writing, you can find him reading out memes on Facebook @ Samuel Samba.