poetry by Meredith Nnoka

Everyone I meet I meet again

Which is how I justify an afterlife. There are too many gone
from this world; where must I go for our next meeting?
What will I have to surrender if not my life? The living come
in repetitive waves, never the same twice, walking in lock step

across the sand. Listen, you must understand me:
I’ve encountered faces I once knew on every street corner
in Chicago, in the jail, in dark theaters, at my local café,
in a restaurant in Minneapolis, on the staircase

of a Smithsonian museum. Worse is when they’ve recognized
me first. And where I saw affirmation of my own worth
reflected back at me, there was instead brutal evidence
of my haunting. I am haunted by the living and the dead,

cannot set one heel upon the ground without unsettling
generations of ghosts, and I will meet them again, too.

Meredith Nnoka (they/she) is a Chicago-based poet, teacher, and prison abolitionist. She is the author of Les Portes, winner of the 2025 CAAPP Book Prize, and the chapbooks I Could Never Be Your Woman (O, Miami, 2023) and A Hunger Called Music: A Verse History of Black Music (C&R Press, 2016). Nnoka holds a BA from Smith College and an MA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, both in Africana studies. She teaches poetry in carceral facilities and has received fellowships from Illinois Humanities, Lambda Literary, and the Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project. Twice nominated for Best of the Net, her poems have appeared in Diode Poetry Journal, Four Way Review, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere.