No one can sayyou didn’t rock metill my heart brokeinto radiance.Waiting for lightningyour pleasuregave me my measure.The island bit downhard on garlicas we rubbed our genitalson the wordsof a song.We set sailon softness thatsustained our passages.
[No one can say]
Uche Nduka
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- July 14, 2024
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“[No one can say]” from BAINBRIDGE ISLAND NOTEBOOK: by Uche Nduka.
Published by Roof Books on October 1, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by Uche Nduka.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Uche Nduka is an itinerant poet-professor and essayist presently living in New York City. He is the author of 13 volumes of poems of which the latest are Fretwire and Scissorwork. Nduka’s work has been translated into Finnish, German, Romanian, Arabic, Turkish, Italian, and Dutch. His essays on music, poetry, mortality and travel have appeared in various online and print outlets. He teaches at the New School’s Eugene Lang College and Queens College-CUNY.
"In Bainbridge Island Notebook, the measure of pleasure is found in the social fact of song. Sparkling with erotic charges and moral conundrums, Uche Nduka detonates novelty in the name of love. His short lines create the rhythmic force of news that William Carlos Williams celebrated. This is poetry new, brave, and boisterous."
— Charles Bernstein
"The poems in Bainbridge Island Notebook bend and blur eros with the ordinary. We read to touch, title, and color. The poems gently invite the reader into their web of anticipation, and desire—line by line, an event horizon."
— Erica Hunt
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