Niki Herd
Summer 2023 | Poetry
Excerpt from The Stuff of Hollywood
Clap for a nigga with his rapping ass blasts inside the cab &
two stops left, yours, & one to deliver the kind young brother
seated next to you to. From the incoming call, cousin,
says the voice. Did you hear that so & so got shot?
No. Nobody’s called me in months, you think. Wasn’t so & so
caught with a bag of guns on some Midwest city street.
13 years-old, should’ve been home, upset about too much
homework, too many chores, not enough time to spend
with friends? I’ll pray for him you say, knowing I’ll pray for him
is a goddamn lie & as cousin on the other end of the phone
says goodbye, you look up into the crisp Chicago night, see at the top
of a brick building a billboard with two 9mm muzzles in profile facing off
as if in conversation, above the left muzzle thoughts, above the right prayers—
& who could make this up? Your accommodations to a hotel
paid by a foundation because you’re in town researching violence
as if it’s all located between the pages of some book &
you want to tell somebody, you want to tell somebody quick
what’s taking place here between State & Dearborn on W. Illinois,
the research, the call about your relative so & so, the billboard,
but now MJ, the Uber driver, self-named after the king of pop,
is the only other body in the car as it hurls toward your destination &
the night-noise of the city returns, couples walk & laugh in slow motion,
leaves fall in their wake, the bass of traffic its own music & inside
the car, the fare adds & glued to the center of the dash,
a bobblehead eagle oscillates fast, the American flag snug in its claw—
Niki Herd is the author of the poetry collection The Language of Shedding Skin and the chapbook don’t you weep, and she co-edited Laura Hershey: On the Life & Work of an American Master with Meg Day. Herd’s poetry, essays, and criticism appear in Gulf Coast, the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, New England Review, Copper Nickel, Academy of American Poets (Poem-a-Day), Lit Hub, The Rumpus, Obsidian, and Tupelo Quarterly, among other journals and anthologies. She has received fellowships from MacDowell, Ucross, Bread Loaf, the Newberry Library, and Cave Canem. Herd earned her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Houston. She currently lives in St. Louis where she is the Visiting Writer in Residence in Poetry at Washington University. Her second full-length poetry collection, The Stuff of Hollywood, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press.
Niki recommends The Vault, Andrés Cerpa and The Art of Fiction, Kevin Prufer.