Poetry by Shilo Niziolek

      Joseph D'Mello CC




Wound I.

how we hold it in our bodies / how our bodies can reproduce it in spectacular and horrifying ways / when we grieve, we expect one another to do so privately / hold it tightly, move on from it as quickly as we can / the repercussions / of doing this too great, catastrophic / how painful it is to love something / the loss of it / cataclysmic, a supernova / do not bury your grief / it is not dead / it is bone and fiber and blood and guts / it will turn / you inside out, even if you try not to let it / this is how you keep the dead alive / conjure them into the spaces around you / resurrect them, make them spirit, ghost / get haunted like that, my friends / here the tip tap of her toes on the hardwood floors, see her out of the peripheral / curled on the edge of the couch, watch her spring / across the yard, bark at the crows / send them flushing up into the air / superimpose her body over the body / of your remaining dog, spot the differences, for there are many / split the lives, extend the multiverse / in every one I have loved you.

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​Wound II.

What came first, the wound or the wound? That the word trauma comes from Greek origins for the word wound. What I meant is that you can’t seal up a cut, but that’s not right, is it? There are stitches, there are sutures, I’ve watched my partner seal cuts on his fingers with superglue, but what’s left? The body is intact still, but it’s not the same. So much of my scar tissue is on the inside, hidden where eyes refuse to see. Mother wound. River wound. Today, we wrapped our river tube around a log, the way the tube crumpled, deflated, the way I drifted away, bashed my knee on a log, wondered if here is where my partner of thirteen years would drown, his sun hat peering back at me from the whirlpool created by the fallen tree. The way I wrote bashed my name, when I meant knee. How after we made our way to the shore, a large frog underwater swam near us, lifted its face out of the water, looked me in the eye. When people say, "Do you think the seizures started because of the grief from losing Roxy, watching her die," maybe what they really mean is, "Hey, I see how you've become what you've become." So much grief in a tiny little body. No wonder the synapses over-fire. Am I even talking about my dog here, the one who, night after sleepless night, would wake, the tremor of the brain tumor ripping open the universe, a tidal wave wound? Aren't I the wild thing out in a wind storm, nose to the ground.




Shilo Niziolek was a 2024 Lambda Literary Fellow. She is the author of Little Deaths, Pigeon House, Fever, and atrophy. Her work has appeared in West Trade Review, Phoebe Journal, Honey Literary, Puked, and Pork Belly Press, among others. Shilo teaches writing and lit at Clackamas Community College and is the co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of the Literary magazine Scavengers, housed with Querencia Press. 
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