Pump Action / Someday, I identify as a Prairie

Two poems by Samuel Samba

Pump Action

when we learned of his body dashed onto a doorframe,

the yeast of a wound bedazzled by light.

eyelids, caved in between—small as a skylark

knife-peeled & brine soaked in saltwater made sweat.

his impetuous bloodstream: all that fuels Minnesota’s temper veining through,

as if hoping to catch a glimpse of him.

I opt-out of the binary & the boldness shivers dusk, how cold berates a child.

how a lightning stammers in the hands of a cop,

learning to quench his flame on an effeminate child.

Fifteen saw me chased by a pistol-mouth from a grown-up spot—guessed into green,

to mix with the wet clay & other soluble denominators of my kind.

Archimedes’ Principle states: a body immersed in water

experiences an upthrust equal to the weight of the fluid displaced.

& I wade without sink—pummelling my right arm.

say, a violence thrust upward, is the whole loin arriving headfirst.

& with this pump action, an object bullets through the wind:

a boy is firearm or skylark, with less than a way to tell which is what.

the cop don’t tell me apart from the wet clay,

& blunders his way through darkness.

I flatten into a punishment—enough to bear the world’s weight.

a boy is satellite stabbed onto a pie chart.

a planet lived on its own.

a boy is meteor, going extinct with each body that eats fire.

Someday, I identify as a Prairie

Glory be to the improper plot: this acre of hand tilled hibiscus

& the dying raven that slants midway, in collapsed grace.

I am thankful for everything that lays chaotic. jagged landmass.

raked mess of depression, inversely proportional to climate change—

the way I discolour in summer. measuring tape laid to waste because,

this is a farm dispute where everyone wants to outcount the other.

when Ma questions me on how I’d love to manage my existence,

I tell her I wish to identify as a desert, barren with opportunity.

ridges laid haphazardly—I find my loin tumbleweeding from its root.

the shower head, gone haywire. all of my dirty-washings, heaping in

the ugly fold of a mountain. It’s barely summer & I have bled past two moons,

dressed my blood, midair—hacking at the tough ground that spoils into green.

hoping my grief looks gorgeous in the face of harm. & say it doesn’t, it still would

remain mine to keep. sorrow knew me in the early hours of my birth. here, look how I

wear the stench. even rain leaves petrichor as aftertaste, in the mouth of the world.

in the chewed minute, I observe night waste in plastic silence. branches shedding from

their trunk. cloth, roasting in the unforgiving heat of summer. all creature here adores

pain. It is one way to worship how we make something of it. even the blank page

adores anguish. still, I choose joy. choose to wrap my head in the moment, scream a

purple song, mow the lawn at the balcony. I joked around the blisters in my palm.

thank the edges for being jagged & improper, thank the blade’s music for making a

mohawk of the grasses & the past that is a bunch of weed—ready for a haircut.

I hope to make sense of my future someday. as of now, I identify as a prairie.