The flame of a question:
how does one wake from the nightmare
when the nightmare was knitted from strands stolen
from your own epidermis? You cannot possibly understand
the weight of a nation straining, back breaking
underneath a sky that someone told you was no longer yours
to claim: how that sky becomes leaden and brackish when
someone steals its leash and turns its teeth on you.
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Category Archives: Big Tent Prompt Poem
Big Tent/WWP Poem #42: The Way Back Home
Perhaps
if I could unravel the threads that ever live behind my skin, I could
find it. There are so many exposed, raw and frayed ends,
and as I have said before,
I pull on them so that you don’t. Watch me
pull away this sweater of a skin, blow the dust off
my bones, and climb the stairs to an attic
that ever collects: there is nothing sacred and safe
from being stolen from walls, from projector screens,
or from the air. Everything is carried home, purloined
beneath the archway of my arm,
slumbering against ribs cradled with adipose and skin,
nestled in the crook of my elbow.
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WWP Poem #40/Big Tent Poem: To Bless These Tired Throats
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This poem was written for two prompts: We Write Poems Prompt #40: Triptych Relationship and this week’s Big Tent Poetry Prompt, which was a Wordle. I adore Wordles, and I love triptych poems. Two things inspired this poem: 1) a broadcast on CNN yesterday afternoon about the protests in Egypt, and 2) the fact that today in the Catholic calendar is the Feast of St. Blaise, and throats are being blessed today by priests because of this. I hope you enjoyed this poem.
-Nicole
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Stumble It!
POW Prompt #9 / Big Tent Poem: Water
How did I begin? I’ll tell you. Picture
me, eight years old, sailor girl,
trying to traverse the seas by a boat made of books. I kept
travelogues in my head, piling them on top of each other until
upon completion, they made Ionic columns feel ashamed of
their own shortness. Now move forward and do it
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Big Tent Poem / WWP Poem #7: Sixteen
This poem was written for both this past Monday’s Big Tent Poetry Prompt and last week’s We Write Poems Prompt. Two ThreeFour visual versions of the poem, plus the original text of the poem, appear below. Click on each graphic to view it large (you might be able to even go larger, depending on your browser).
Visual Poem, Version 1 (Click to View)
Visual Poem, Version 2 (Click to View)
Visual Poem, Version 3
Visual Poem, Version 4
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When the stars bleed through pinholes
like a heroin serenade walking up the tracks
of an earthquake arm where veins are fault lines
and bruises are epicenters where footfalls land;
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Big Tent Poem: An Open Letter to A Suicide Bomber
This poem was written for Big Tent Poetry’s Monday Wordle Prompt this past week. I decided to do something a little different this time around. I erased a couple of words from the original Wordle graphic and managed to use the rest in a poem…written directly onto the graphic.
I wrote this, inspired by Neil Reid’s poem, “The invisible human like a bomb”. You must go read this poem, which had a huge impact on me. It moved me to speak to her.
Click on the graphic below to enlarge and read. Feel free to print this, view it in another window, etc. Some of the verses are placed vertically because the original word I used in some cases is vertical in the original graphic.
Enjoy.
-Nicole
Written 6/18/10
© Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.
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Big Tent Poem: Crumple-Proof
You look for my sapience inside
my circuitry. I am
an ensnarer, a woman of neural nets
like fine spun spider webs: silver gossamer
and plastic blue. Wrap that net around you,
and I might embrace you in angel hair or
slice you apart until you give up being human
and become puzzle.
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