
Nikia Chaney
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Biography
Nikia Chaney is a poet from the Inland Empire of California. She is author of two chapbooks, Sis Fuss (2012, Orange Monkey Publishing) and ladies, please (2012, Dancing Girl Press). She is founding editor of shufpoetry, an online journal for experimental poetry, and founding editor of Jamii Publishing, a publishing imprint dedicated to fostering community among poets and writers. She has won grants from the Barbara Demings Fund for Women, Poets & Writers, and Cave Canem. She teaches at San Bernardino Valley College
Poem
flesh works
flesh works
be it a center for control
or a needle
drawing hunger
Shelly makes a doll
and we all line up
to the disease
infatuation with our Haitian greys
black eyes naming us creature
heads swollen like
red grapes
these sweating
rags of simularity
and this dried blood
each stump a heartbeat
insists a night visit
the possibilities of Halperin’s
metallic light
so do sing Carpenter
of your seminal
fire complex
as a stretched
figure dragging
delicate body danglings slow
miserably needed free
for Lovecraft was right
everything needs
to eat