Disconnect by Khadijah Queen
Disconnect
Khadijah QueenHuman disaster is contagious, so I’m left
alone, like I thought I wanted. Self-pity says
no one wants a sinking ship
of a woman, rafting on hate for how much
what she knows she keeps taking. No heartbreak
or inspiration to sell as end goal,
rarely beauty. Instead, indictment
and unrelenting grief, pain and identifying
purpose, blame and sour shame—all
wounds that won’t heal. World won’t
let the stitches set before landing
another blow—no entertaining real
solutions. Outside the self the reckoning
bulks up like a recurrent tumor. Or a monstera
flown free of its old planter. I read on the Internet
that plants are brains. Quiet pulses of green
unseen except by time lapse. I can imagine their depression
when one of them dies. Living the tragedy of being
ahead of one’s time while predicting
possible futures ain’t for the faint-hearted,
just the foolish. I can’t help how my brain wires
catastrophic knowing. What happens when alchemy fails
all the way? When medicines and glyphosate combine
over time with moonshine mistakes
to finally trip the liver’s limits? Remember me as kind
and messy, a brighter contradiction than even I
could handle. If I didn’t live
as hard as I could have, disaster self and all, I’d still
wish you all a thousand times better.
KEEP READING
SHARED WITH GRATITUDE
This poem appeared in Amsterdam Review, Spring 2026.
ABOUT KHADIJAH QUEEN
Khadijah Queen’s most recent book is Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: A Veteran’s Memoir (Legacy Lit, 2025). She is the author of the full-length poetry collections Conduit (Black Goat/Akashic Books, 2008), Black Peculiar (Noemi Press, 2011), Fearful Beloved (Argos Books, 2015), Non-Sequitur (Litmus Press, 2015), and I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On (YesYes Books, 2017). Her chapbooks include Exercises in Painting (Bloof Books, 2016). Her
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ENDNOTES
- This is Day 3 of The Sealey Challenge 2026—a community challenge to read one book of poetry a day for the month of August, named after Nicole Sealey.
- Explore other works in pursuit of: grief • despair • resilience • Or browse the index
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