Knitting Grief
I ask the words of my grief to loosen and become.
I tell them to dance their letters onto my blank page
like a puzzled wool untangling.
But there are too many jumbled letters I am trying to pick,
and my fingers start to sweat and hurt.
I use my teeth to separate a word embracing another:
“You two do not belong,” I say.
When I was a child—a child whose tongue spoke deviations,
my mother would say:
“Us does not begin a sentence,”
or
“You do not say I and you.”
So I learned that in the making of meaning,
words must be free
from any form of touch too false—
like the touch of my mother and I.
It takes a long time of biting, picking, and fighting the tangles
till they let themselves come undone
and become a whole body of words.
Great, now I need to knit them into meanings
as visible and concrete as I am;
into bodies I can hold when the cold wind whips me.
Perhaps, I should make them into a scarf or sweater for warmth.
No, a bag. A cap? A man?
The words are lying on my lost palms, waiting.
I shuffle and search the archives of my mind,
almost tumbling down dusty shelves of memories,
till I see the memory
where tall grasses gather and grow
over my mother’s earth.
Mom, I have no idea what to make.
Conversations
When journeying,
I slow down my utterances on a bumpy road,
careful not to move faster than my tongue.
I look sideways and make a comment about a person’s outfit
or a ruckus beginning to bubble:
people gathering around, angry words and fists dancing in the air.
I see a building that reminds me of something or someone.
Someone’s voice cuts into my ride. A phone rings.
Now I’m getting back on track, steady, focusing on the road,
hitting every point I intend to make—
till I stumble upon a roadblock:
it forces me to take a bend. I deviate. I turn
and reach a compromise.
Pleasant Nneoma Stephen is a poet, academic tutor, and language enthusiast. Her works have appeared in Decolonial Passage, Vagabond City Literature, Literary Forest Poetry Magazine, Squawk Back, and elsewhere. A 2025 Fellow of the Sprinng Writing Fellowship and a gold award certificate recipient of the senior category of the 2023 Queen’s Commonwealth Essay Competition, she reads poetry for Cypress Review. Pleasant is currently an undergraduate student of English and Literary Studies at McPherson University. An ardent lover of doodles, rainfall, and African mythology, her work revolves around the intersection of nature, myth, human experiences and other themes of vulnerability. When she’s not writing poems, she’s reading grammar and poetry and writing silly linguistic hypotheses. Pleasant writes poetry reviews and analyses on Weekend’s Poets, a Substack publication. Visit her substack and a list of her publications. Pleasant lives in Lagos, Nigeria. Instagram: @_lele.is_