Itemized Checks
Oliver Nash
There’s a coyote’s skull at Hurricane Creek / there’s a new table in your section / your life, sectioned / an hour of each day in each canine eyeball / a new set of fangs / sun-bleached / the customers / sun-bleached / coyote could run but eight hundred miles / four highways / alley smoke break / cool-running river for paws to dip / don’t stop a ruptured lung / internal wounds / essential / contained / your stress / contained / paws hit stone & entrees hit table / & you’re still moving / & you haven’t hiked in months / & breath still comes / shallowing / tumbling / a fall forward / gravity’s grace / you wonder, what kills a coyote? / you wonder, will you always be only passing through? / there’s a high turnover at this restaurant / there’s a copperhead in the water / biding time / binding time to the instant of / strike / sink / release / breathe in / release / if you call out, will they fire you? / if you die somewhere, is it finally Home?
Oliver Nash’s writing has been published in The Offing, Spectrum Literary Journal, The Headlight Review, the Santa Ana River Review, and The Albion Review, among others. In 2022, they were a finalist for The Headlight Review's chapbook contest and the Ohioana Library Association’s Walter Rumsey Marvin Grant, a semi-finalist for the Tomaž Šalamun prize, and was longlisted for the Frontier Poetry Chapbook Contest. Their work crosses genres—from sci-fi and horror to the new weird and humor, to more traditional literary fiction—in order to tackle issues such as eco-anxiety, existentialism, and queerness. They are currently an MFA candidate at the University of Alabama, where their time is split between wandering the woods and trying to write the next great weird novel. They can be found online at olivernashwrites.com.