Friday Feature: Nina Oteria
- Jae Nichelle
- 23 minutes ago
- 4 min read
Nina Oteria is a poet, artist, and former educator from Raleigh, North Carolina. Her poetry has been published in Southern Cultures, Apogee, Scalawag Magazine, and elsewhere. She performs in Durham, Raleigh, and Chapel Hill based poetry reading series'. Nina was a featured performer at NC State’s Gregg Museum of Art and Design. She is one of the founding poets of the Corcoran Poetry Wall mural installation in Durham, NC.
Nina uses poetry and art as a means to heal herself and her community, upholding the Black storytelling tradition. Nina’s co-written manuscript, A Matter of Radical Pushback: Political TheoPoetics of the Black Imagination, is forthcoming from Wipf and Stock Publishers. Nina’s chapters in this manuscript illuminate the importance of “slow theology” for Black artists and teachers, combining poetry, academic writing, and theology, and describing artmaking as a spiritual practice. Nina holds an MFA in Writing from Pratt Institute and a BA in Religious Studies from Wake Forest University. Nina facilitates Sweetgum Workshop, a healing and creative arts ministry. She is a former English and Creative Writing teacher at Raleigh Charter High School.
Numerical
“We’re spending life loving it exclusively because we couldn’t change the world.”
Etel Adnan
sea and fog
6.
A car is a function of capitalism. We must move faster so that numbers may circulate. Money isn’t real, it's a flow of characters on screens. But if you ignore the numbers, the police will soon show up at your door.
2.
The blue evening touches me on Sunday. I’m thinking about blue things before I get in my car tomorrow and ride as fast as a certain number to get to my desk at another number then pay close attention to the numbers on the small, inaccurate moon bound to my right wrist. (I put away the number screen because it makes me dizzy.)
5.
I ask God about time. God points to the moon, to the sunrise and 300 starlings snatching my frosty breath from my throat as they fly. I ask God about time and God says my veins are blue. God won’t tell me how many veins I have, even though I ask. Numbers are most important to everyone except God.
3.
You can’t have any food or medicine unless you first pledge allegiance to imaginary numbers. I wanted to have imaginary friends when I was younger; I kept forgetting to imagine them. I was given a blue betta fish instead. I took care of his small body. My Dad kept his tank clean and he lived long for someone completely alone and in captivity. When he died I was jumping rope.
1.
Sunday morning I woke up to a minor tornado. Recently I dreamed of a cheetah and my childhood cheetah print backpack, never tempted to count the spots. In the tornado I felt irritated at a man and I thought it was true. I realized I was just tired. My body fluctuates within the month’s numbers, the month’s numbers which stay the same. In the dream the cheetah looked at me intently, not skittish, as if it wanted to tell me something. Throughout the day I wonder what numbers are on the screens when I can’t see them.
8.
I ask my body for information on what is happening around me apart from my senses. My body says, “What’s the point? All you listen to is numbers. You’re my imaginary friend. You’re my pet rock.” I don’t know how to respond to that so I check the time, the number in the blue dusk. 3 more hours till I pull the plug on my body’s ruminations. I can’t understand most of her poetry.
9.
I ask God about poetry and God says veins, the ocean, the dirt (meaning earth). The blue evening of the world’s very first day. In prayer I am under all those layers. Numbers come apart at their angles like chairs with broken legs. God winks and I start to laugh uncontrollably. When I open my eyes I see my 1st gray hair in the mirror. Numbers are distracting. I walk towards the car so that I may begin to circulate like change. It takes focus to see what’s real in this rain.
4.
The academy whipped me up into a frenzy of negativity, a cloud of numbers, a hailstorm of signifiers used to make the same general proposition. Now I am moving from blue’s opposite into blue. My veins decrease/increase their circulation. I am in no hurry. I don’t want to talk to anymore number people because there are still many questions I have to ask God. God always makes me laugh even in the midst of captivity, tornadoes, and my brain, my pet rock.
7.
Money is a car. The self a character on a screen, a small inaccurate moon. I am a wing in no hurry. Numbers, when rotated, dissected, and collaged, resemble the flowers of poetry, which are the meanings of sunlight and blueness. This is not just my opinion, this is really what God told me. So all is not lost.
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Torch Literary Arts is a 501(c)3 nonprofit established to publish and promote creative writing by Black women. We publish contemporary writing by experienced and emerging writers alike. Programs include the Wildfire Reading Series, writing workshops, and retreats.