Nandi Njeri-Ayinde Comer
WebsiteYears: 2008, 2010, & 2011
Biography
Nandi Comer currently serves as poetry editor for the Indiana Review. She is also pursuing an MFA in Poetry and an MA in African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University. She has received a Vera Meyer Strube Poetry Prize, as well as fellowships from Callaloo. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Another and Another: An Anthology From the Grind Daily Writing Series (Bull City Press, 2012), Crab Orchard Review, Callaloo, Sycamore Review, and Third Coast. She is originally from Detroit.
Poem
Tamed
I want the tongue to earn its place
on the clavicle. And the palm
to form the shape of pelvis, of forearm,
of shin. I want the body to disappear
under tremble. And the heart
with its golden petals? If bone
was infrangible, and eyes
not such delicate recorders—
but no. I want the bite, and the raking
nail. Body, can’t you imagine
the arresting scale, the spine’s
tense arch? I fight
your hum, your perpetual want.
But the frame, but all my cavities
unplumbed and quivering.
"Tamed" first appeared in Spoon River Poetry Review in December 2013