Poems
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, The WB Yeats Society of NY
(2025, Honorable Mention)
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)
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)
Ink and Water
9 across asks “what remains”—
five letters. I write TRUTH,
scratch it out, try FAITH.
Neither fits with 3 down.
The clues mock my need
for clean edges, perfect lines.
Sometimes I leave squares blank,
let the spaces be.
I stare at 12 down—
“Life’s meaning (7 letters)”—
and write NOTHING, testing
how the crosses align.
The hint says “See 4 across”
which points to “See 27 down”
and back again—an infinite loop
of questions asking questions.
The grid makes promises
it can’t keep: that answers
converge, that every space
fills precisely, that black
and white divide themselves
with geometric symmetry.
Some days I solve
in ink, tempting fate.
Others, I write in water,
letting each guess slip away
before it sets, knowing
tomorrow’s grid comes empty.
The Coup
(2025)
Preserves
I find her journal in the root cellar,
leather-bound prophecies of ruin,
the year-by-year retreat of seasons.
She knew what was coming.
The pages fill with alarm, then silence.
Empty mason jars line the shelves,
waiting for harvests that came too early
or not at all.
Some nights, coyotes pace
the property edges,
reading the fine print of abandonment
They know how to wait out civilization.
SHIFT Literary Magazine
(2026, Publication forthcoming)
About
Elana Churchill is a Black woman poet whose work explores how memory and unknowing move through body, time, ritual, and language. Her poems have been published in The Louisville Review, SHIFT Literary Magazine, and The Coup, and she received a 2025 Yeats Poetry Prize Honorable Mention, judged by January Gill O'Neil.
She is completing her first chapbook and writes from Tennessee, where reading, running, and time with animals shape her practice.