Poems

Evidence of Absence

Time slides sideways. 

I collect remnants of
what never was,
what might have been,
knowing neither exists. 

Every morning,
I sweep more of it
into neat piles by the door. 

Funny how you can drown
in what never happened.

The Coup
(2025, 1st Place in Literature)

Blood Memory (for Octavia)

She wrote apocalypse like
she was taking minutes.

No soft landings in her worlds—
only bone, only thirst,
grief that calcifies,
faith learning to hunt,
mutation as survival’s price.

Her prophets crawled
through wildfires burning
and spoke in ember and ash,
knowing god was change
and nothing else would last.

She gave us black girls
who wouldn’t bow or bend,
whose fingers sparked lightning,
revolution etched
into the map of their palms.

She traced the raised lines,
showed how history’s claws
pierce deeper than memory—
leaving marks that scab, scar
but never stop being.

Ancestors collapsed into
the present, and we learned
what we call history
isn’t relic or ghost but
blood memory, still feeding.

Her aliens wore bodies
as borrowed clothes,
taught us plague could
reshape us, showed us
how humanity ends:

Not with surrender
but with metamorphosis,
each betraying its neighbor
until we are all
strangers.

Now we live inside her warning:
world on fire, seas rising,
zealots burning libraries,
tyrants wrapped in flags,
every headline reading like
rough drafts of her novels.

Yeats Poetry Prize, W.B. Yeats Society of NY
(2025, Honorable Mention; to be published Summer 2025)

Time’s Accordion

I am the girl
who counted Mississippis between lightning,
and the woman tracking time by pill bottles. 
I am scraped knees on hot concrete,
and the ache of joints mapping every fall. 

Time folds inward,
pleating moments together,
each ripple carrying
the first step, the fade of stars. 

Years coil in my DNA,
spiraling through generations,
threading the needle
between memory and dream. 

My child self plays hopscotch
through tomorrow’s uneven ground,
while life carves canyons
between my smile lines. 

I am all my ages at once:
like rays through prisms,
past and future bending
into pure light.

The Coup
(2025)

Unmapped Mornings

breakfast in bed /
coffee stains and
dog-eared paperbacks splayed
like lovers across rumpled velvet /
no one to judge the crumbs that
map constellations across the sheets /
let them call it lonely
this fortress of blankets and words /
they can’t taste the freedom
in eating messy, living unbridled
without performance or permission /
emptiness is just hunger
mistaking absence for appetite /
and this feast of abandon
tastes of brown sugar, raw silk, and fire /

About

Elana Churchill is an emerging Black woman poet who writes about transformation, identity, and the quiet revolutions of healing. Her work has appeared in The Coup (Minot State University) and was honored with a 2025 Yeats Poetry Prize Honorable Mention, judged by January Gill O’Neil.

She is working on her first chapbook and writes from Tennessee.