poetry by Meredith Nnoka

[I can talk about the hospital]

I can talk about the hospital all day, but what
is there to say that hasn’t already been screamed
from its barred windows? That place is a vacant nightmare,
to which you can attest. They tried to separate us,

me from you, and in doing so stole the speech
from my throat. I spent that week in an all-encompassing
silence until I broke to tell a woman her life
of suffering had to mean something, because I needed

to believe it for myself. I have never returned,
yet perhaps I have never left. And you, my most steadfast
companion, have never abandoned me, not in my hour
of lowly need in the locked room they called

the quiet place, nor in the days that followed
when I returned to my life in the bed I’d planned to die in.

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.