Matthew Nienow, If Nothing

 

WHAT LUCK

I lived. Lived again. Wrecked,
hungover. Swerved in the dark
from river back to bunk
and never hit a tree. Never was
pulled over when my only
tongue was Swamp. Locked
my keys in the trunk in a thunder
storm, done hotboxing the Cimarron
with can’t remember, car halfway
in the road. Aura of blunt, pungent
as roadkill skunk. Always made it
home. Always stumbling thick-
tongued, lucky if I didn’t get the spins,
mumbling if I had to speak, numb
thing dump in the truest sense.
floor was floor and I was on it, gone
wind in a way. Also stone.
Somehow sang even undone.
Almost alone, even throned
among future tombs, I lived,
the coal of my heart on a slow
burn, no time to lose, no such
thing as time, eyes turned
to the lack of light, skull
locked tight, crowned alive, the King
of Lost Keys.

I hadn’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 of Water (Alice James Books, 2016). Set with an opening and closing poem on either side of five untitled sections of poems, Nienow has articulated a collection of tight, narrative, first-person meditations that offer a purposeful meandering, composing poems that attempt to both place and find himself. “Guilt’s my godfather,” he writes, to open the poem “OWNERSHIP,” “footing all 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 quite like, as these poems attempt clarity, through the first person lyric, pushing deep into family and addiction, marriage and despair, into the self to examine with a firm hand and straightforward line. The poem “FIVE YEARS NOW” begins: “without a drink, but in dreams / such timelines do not // exist. I can be 12 again, or 20. / I can be in the middle of hurting // myself for the final time, / in the middle 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 undercurrent to this entire collection, as Nienow’s lyrics offer the clarity of held breath and a straight line enough that it might cut into the skin; poems that wrestle with all he ever was, is and could be, writing out what he could be against what 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 of his 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 those experiences never fully behind. As the opening poem, “ON THE CONDITION OF BEING BORN,” begins: “As you were, then. As you were / at the moment of your first breath / outside the mother, good / before you knew any other way to be. / Who can remember such a time?”