Futures Glossary | Nadia Niva

A language is coming
After I have everything
All my faulty
All my faulty godmothers
Besotted knee disasters
Blinking the clabbered poems
Cavorting with the wishes
Cavorting with the other wishes in slippers
Constricted of time
Enough prattling
For a sesquipedalian woman
Fumbly and really faux
God the forgetful
God the forgetful
I alphabetize nervously towards you
I can’t stop rehearsing middle-aged schemes
I salted myself with crisis
Its auburn scriptures
Its forgetfulness
I’ll stop rolling away
Lolling like sandcastles
Mindskittering growth
Mining poems for stumbling epiphanies
My glorious syndromes
My grid-locked lines
My nanny capacity
My reminders
My seasons?
Not a list
Not my life
Nothing there
Of purring to faulty imposters
Pick an antique genre
Pounce between books
Shutting away my dolls
Shy wishcasting
Somewhat of a preparation
Studying swollen integers
The eyes cloud the situation
The place
The vague kitty
The wave
The world
Their century
Their woes
They
They
They go parade
With you it’s sleepwalking
Words leading on pawing
You in boredom
You intuit my am
You intuit my sore arm
You wearisome muckraker
You who sidewalk entire winter days
You will be here forever

Nadia Niva is a poet and childcare worker from the Pacific Northwest. Her writing appears in b l u s h, scaffold, Dreck Lit, and Expat Press, among other publications. Her collaborative chapbook with Judy Thorn, Index Letters (Maywall Press, 2026), was published in June.