Lust as corporal punishment, implies we kneel on each other for pleasure.
boy: a gadget I stomach on sighting my father watch me pull the least
non-binary stunt I’m capable of.
I— double-edged pronoun, perishable filth
Pa tells me— ‘snithe every thumb that points towards your thigh’.
my knee, polished into amazement.
I arch my back with ripe grace, & fall into shape.
a rebuttal to the soft-meated claim, that:
a) ache is tenderized hardship.
b) thigh at rest is hot argument lying-in state.
c) all thighs in motion becomes dangerous physics.
the mechanical grease of skin, alarming Pa in all the right places.
I’d have him know queer is volatile:
both knee, riding one way into blood-soft bliss & wearing out.
autumn, ramming through effeminacy under the wingspan of zephyr’s lawful caressing,
bruising bedsheets of breeze in the smallest of moaned decibel.
I still wear the wind, this malodorous air trapped under my loin.
the weight of language— press to my lip. thighs, ripening a quiet noise.
how color spill against the bright body of word till it bleeds meaning,
empties itself into grammar— barefaced, as we rupture into sound & ampersand:
a roughening. the neat prank of my loin,
modeled after a calmness in the quiet heat.
dusk reminds me, I too am capable of luster.
a large chunk of me, sold to light. miniature leakage of flesh— fluorescent bright.
I’m ghosted by sweat, the way my skin torches at the sound of grief.
happiness is a hard-nut-to-crack.
I am munching my bliss— every bit of it.
I skip the raw detailed niceties of life,
teethe on a lusting, unabashed.
the peelable pronoun in the valley of my back:
a testament to how I love my gendering— bone-clean & slightly devoured.
this is how we stay edible,
unshelling our bodies till the magic burns out.
we all arrive at climax or nutting.
either way, a hard-nut-to-crack.
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 won the River Heron Editor’s Prize 2022, Bronze prize for the Creative Future Writer’s Award 2022, UK London, the Virginia Tech Center for Refugee, Migrants & Displacement Studies Annual Award, 2023, and recently won the 2023 Stacy Doris Memorial Award (Fourteen Hills) San Francisco State University Review.
