NIKKI DONADIO - POEMS

Nikki Donadio holds a Master of Arts in Creative Writing and is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers. Her work can be found in Plenitude, Jellyfish Review, Yes Poetry, Soliloquies Anthology and others. 

​This is not a poem about flowers

The love-me-not petal sticks to the pavement. 
Pink bleeds out, colour wrung by your heel 
pressed good and firm into its skin

It’s too easy to write poems this way:
we are like flowers. We are like plants.
We are like trees.

But then, it’s not as if we’ve lost
this bond between stalk and spine, 
stamen and synapse.

This is not a poem about flowers.

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Learning to Tie a Tie
​

I follow the Youtuber:
looped over, under, through,
wiggled my finger inside the knot.

Loosen — and do it over 
and over and over.
I learned from hands 

and a voice with 
no face. No fingers  
to reach out to me and 

help me form this knot, 
help me fly this flag
around my neck. 

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They Got it Wrong in the Garden
​

Y’see, the fruit was meant to be eaten
but just by Eve and no one else. 

Juice made for stickiness, easier to
grip the axe,

grip the spine of the book, the pen, the
knife. Whatever instrument she required.

Juice to feed her muscles, juice to soothe her
cramps. Flesh for energy, so she could run free.

Let all the fruit be Eve’s forever: a salve, a lover --
currency, stone, pillow.



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