Uche Nduka

As It Is

We consulted with her brother
about heteronyms & burnout.
Corridor & beetroot.

Goosebumps an hour north. Disrupt
or be disrupted. Puffins on raw rock.

Redwood rafters out of sight. Or
retreatants, thereof.

After the hangovers & guilt-trips. Quite
often kicking the door blasting
texts in the shower.

I almost fell over trying
to put something on.
This onion has bedroom eyes.
Love in the raw.

In return even louder.

Pink Alert

He outrightly laughs
at their pearl-clutching
next to the underpass

madness of the voice-over while I'm having
my neck examined

with a taste of the east
a step into the
bottomless word

not quite a blank slate to work on
you wore no underwear
only a black tank top

caught a midday plane
to New Orleans
one poem is just a
door leading to the next door

Ledge and Gristle

Tonic and zine
as the music was
being cooked. Reels,
layer, chubby tenor.
A surge of chords
mowing a lawn. There's
more to heckling dominoes
than you know. Acidic
as a backlit snarl. So
fiddle around, stay loose,
tip off a walkout.
Recording on the fly. A
vault to crack. Brave
the trip. Blow an amp.

Uche Nduka is a poet, essayist, and collagist presently living in New York City. He is the author of 14 volumes of poems of which the latest are Scissorwork (Roof Books, 2022) and Bainbridge Island Notebook (Roof Books, 2023). His work has been translated into Italian, Finnish, Romanian, Arabic, Spanish, German, Turkish, Dutch. He teaches at the New School's Eugene Lang College and Queens College-CUNY.