Matthew Nienow, If Nothing

 

WHAT LUCK

I lived. Lived again. Wrecked,
hungover. Swerved in thedark
from river back to bunk
and never hit a tree. Neverwas
pulled over when my only
tongue was Swamp. Locked
my keys in the trunk in athunder
storm, done hotboxing theCimarron
with can’t remember, carhalfway
in the road. Aura ofblunt, pungent
as roadkill skunk. Alwaysmade it
home. Always stumblingthick-
tongued, lucky if I didn’tget the spins,
mumbling if I had tospeak, numb
thing dump in the truestsense.
floor was floor and I wason it, gone
wind in a way. Also stone.
Somehow sang even undone.
Almost alone, eventhroned
among future tombs, I lived,
the coal of my heart on aslow
burn, no time to lose, nosuch
thing as time, eyesturned
to the lack of light,skull
locked tight, crownedalive, the King
of Lost Keys.

Ihadn’t heard of Port Townsend, Washington poet and mental health counselor Matthew Nienow before seeing a copy of his second full-length collection, If Nothing (New Gloucester ME: Alice James Books, 2025), following his debut, House ofWater (Alice James Books, 2016). Set with an opening and closing poem oneither side of five untitled sections of poems, Nienow has articulated acollection of tight, narrative, first-person meditations that offer apurposeful meandering, composing poems that attempt to both place and findhimself. “Guilt’s my godfather,” he writes, to open the poem “OWNERSHIP,” “footingall the bills. / Cleaning out my chimney / each spring, bags and bags / of ash.I know how good / I have it. I know.” There’s an honesty to these poems I quitelike, as these poems attempt clarity, through the first person lyric, pushingdeep into family and addiction, marriage and despair, into the self to examinewith a firm hand and straightforward line. The poem “FIVE YEARS NOW” begins: “withouta drink, but in dreams / such timelines do not // exist. I can be 12 again, or20. / I can be in the middle of hurting // myself for the final time, / in themiddle of waking up // to whatever wounding meant / to that man almost gone //from every world I’ve known.” There’s some dark years running as undercurrentto this entire collection, as Nienow’s lyrics offer the clarity of held breathand a straight line enough that it might cut into the skin; poems that wrestlewith all he ever was, is and could be, writing out what he could be againstwhat he should be; an undertone of what he almost was, each poem, each moment,closer to a clarity and attention that might be a process across the rest ofhis life. If you’ve ever been attempting or navigating the other side of bad choices,these are poems in that exact space: having emerged, with the shadow of thoseexperiences never fully behind. As the opening poem, “ON THE CONDITION OF BEINGBORN,” begins: “As you were, then. As you were / at the moment of your firstbreath / outside the mother, good / before you knew any other way to be. / Whocan remember such a time?”