Haemorrhage 

The first shot cracks open the red mouth

of a wound, and the ballroom begins to hemorrhage music.

Glass nerves shatter with the chandeliers.

Bone dust rises. The woman beside the fire splits the night open

like overripe pawpaw and presses into my hands 

a bowl of venom warm as rainwater.

Drink. Her voice— a small bird trapped in silence. 

So I swallow. And a burning city hatches inside my chest. 

My breath becomes smoke. My lungs—two forests 

teaching hurricanes how to pronounce anger.

Life, a thin rug of dust spread before tomorrow’s door.

We wipe our feet on it before entering grief. Some nights

I invite sorrow into my bed. I hold its skull against my ribs

until it hums like a wounded animal dreaming of green rain.

Outside the city, bullets migrate through the wind,

wheel across the sky—a flock of copper swallows 

searching for a body to remember in its dismemberment.

Lust climbs my eyes like vines devouring an abandoned house.

Darkness drips from the mouth of absence. I write everything down

before silence devours the alphabet. Across the ocean,

the tide loosens its blue hair and combs the bones of drowned voices.

The waves arrive wearing salt like ancestral jewels. Then absence

breaks open its coffin the way lightning breaks open a cloud.

Blood blossoms in the streets— Bearded men float inside it

like uprooted baobabs after a storm. At the mortuary, a pastor 

lifts an oil above our heads. It trembles—a small captive sun.

He blesses us but the room smells of thunder and unfinished storms.

Girls like us, he says, carry misfortune wide as the horizon.

A grief large enough to plant forests in the chest.
BIO:

Abdulsamad Idris is a writer and poet from Kwara State Nigeria. His work has appeared in the Synchronize Chaos Magazine and many others. He tweet on Instagram as Abdulsamad Idris