• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

New Orleans Review

Since 1968

  • home
  • Latest Issue
    • Art
    • Fiction
    • Poetry
    • Essays
  • Past Issues
  • Songs of the Sunbirds
    • recipes
    • art/video
    • poetry
    • nonfiction/essays
  • Book Reviews
  • Interviews
  • Archive
    • Art
    • Poetry
    • Fiction
    • Essays
    • Art Column
  • About
  • Submit
You are here: Home / 52 / Someday, I identify as a Prairie

Someday, I identify as a Prairie

52, New Poetry by Nnadi Samuel

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 discolor 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.
.


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 Bronze prize for the Creative Future Writer’s Award 2022, UK London.

Primary Sidebar

Connect with NOR

  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Twitter

Call for Submissions

Call for submissions for biannual issues and ongoing column of Palestinian voices. Learn more and submit your work here.

Latest Book Review

Museum of the Soon to Depart

reviewed by Adedayo Agarau

VISIT THE BOOK REVIEW ARCHIVE

New Orleans Review is delighted to announce the publication of its first book, Interviews from the Edge: 50 Years of Conversations about Writing and Resistance
(Bloomsbury 2019).

Visit the Digital Archive of NOR Print Issues, 1968-2019

Footer

  • About
  • Current
  • Archive
  • Submit
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
Loyola University logo
The opinions of our contributors do not represent Loyola University New Orleans as a whole.
Copyright © 2025 · New Orleans Review
title illustration by Guen Montgomery · site by MJG