Picking The Hairs off my Father’s Chest// An Oral Tradition
Picking The Hairs off my Father’s Chest// An Oral Tradition
Age moves in on his skin like an unhoused tradition.
the animal white, culturing a garden of braids on his bare chest.
snake is a motif in this undergrowth—
the way a pale hair repeats its curves round a healthy black strand.
once he rushes home, unbuttons his shirt & lays down to be plucked bald like a bird.
the hot water whistling on the countertop begs to be used on the wrong body,
as if I mean my neck, in place of what wants to be peeled.
he throats my name with an appeal.
a razor pressed on a naira note, clean as ritual:
my bluntness wants to refuse this sharp language,
but the terror here pays my bills.
I don a glove in hand & his furs stands at attention.
to hair-pick, I have to spread my fingertips apart, before closing in on a white hair.
I do not put the blade to its original use, lest the cannibal edge eat into his pores.
his chest avoids my watching, till I’m sworn vigilante.
I carry the torch of my eyes to work,
pick a lock from its root, memorize the sibilant sign /ʃ/
& emerge from the sigh onto the ethanol space—perfumed with shaving cream.
my palm—a balm of gilead gillette, soothing his first ache.
dead-white & lamenting symbols keeps falling off his chest into the gadget of my arm.
my follicles, sucking in the stain of music.
its reptile sound, fathered to speak a knotting nothing.
I was once this boy that chewed a dialect into disremembrance.
now, I raise my jaw to a solo in a room full of English.
when an accent comes for me, I echo a rejoinder that is empty of speech.
of what use is a tongue, if it can’t voice your trauma in local spit?
he calls me these days with an unknown number,
& for lack of words—I pick my own hair as an oral tradition.
except that, the razor here is pressed to my skin,
& that terror pays my bills.
I am wounded to sound like the dead: a groan of maybes,
a syntax of tied breath, blent by the storm inside of me.
like a can of worm, I open into complications.
grief salts the edge of my body, till I half myself on a riot of cellular wiring.
I break into static, an imbalance of electric charge.
the shockwaves, sending me down to ruin in a way that is incoherent.
I practice glossolalia in my trance-like state, picking the gutter remains of my slurry stammer.
a speech is nothing, if it doesn’t kneel on your panic button—till it has you drunk.
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 8x Pushcart.