time :: the nick

by Evie Shockley

Poet

Evie Shockley is a literary scholar and poet. Her books of poetry include a half-red sea, 31 words * prose poems, The Gorgon Goddess, and the new black, winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Her collection semiautomatic was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; other recognitions include the Holmes National Poetry Prize, the Lannan Poetry Prize, the Stephen Henderson Award, and the 2023 Shelley Memorial Award. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, including The Nation, New America, Brilliant Corners, and the anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. Evie is a professor at Rutgers University, where she teaches African American literature and creative writing.

Artist

Leigh Wells is a multimedia artist who constructs collage, drawings, and sculpture of found materials, paper, and fabric as well as paintings on pieced textiles that consist of simple, restrained abstract forms. Her artwork has been exhibited internationally and has appeared frequently in The New York Times and Harper’s Magazine.

February 6, 2025

“what is in time?”

—dionne brand

everything and nothing ::

the ambulance

the apology

the wrinkle

the retrieval

catastrophe averted

is still carried in the bloodstream,

constricted heart, arteries ::

cellfuls of could-have-been

collected and held

out to community, posterity ::

the chasing hounds,

their toothy growling fury, even

escaped, bites the imagination

descended from this danger, nips

and holds the skin of the then

to the now, a bloody fold

pinned by an ivory staple ::

the nick of time ::

a mark borne and reborn,

generation after generation ::

the time nicked,

hours, days, years spent

holding the line against deaths

designated, designed, waiting

for us, the nick

marking the passage

of the time of unfreedom

on our bodies, passed down

as the babies pass through the nick

of time opening, bloody,

between slick thighs ::

the rebirth of hope,

of will :: children stapled

by bomb shards

to their people’s past, some far-

too-late future branded as just

in time, are nicked,

unnicked into a world

where they must steal back

what belongs to them ::

everything and nothing ::

the arrival

the acknowledgement

the reparations

the return

time :: the nick

by Evie Shockley

Read More from Vol. 5: Time

When the Prince of Heaven Sleeps

Gourds

Here Come the Lionfish

Time Thinks of Time

Wild Clocks

Deep Time Diligence