Undertow, by Nicole Nicholson

This week over at We Write Poems I asked people to plug one (or more) of their own poems into Wordle and then write a poem using the most frequently occuring words. As I’ve been pretty busy and haven’t written in a couple of weeks, it was a bit of a challenge, but looking at my Wordle again inspired me to create the above. Blow it up, print it out, save it, rotate it, read it. I hope you enjoy.

-Nicole

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Mom's House by Sarah Regnier

This is no statute crying blood,
no wounds weeping from the palm of hands. The
Jesus on your wall pried himself off that cross
a long time ago, leaving nothing but porcelain and floral
in his wake. The imprint of his perfect, clean back
rises in flight, arms extended like absence as it
hovers above the rest of the bric-a-brac flying low solitude
and anchored to the wall. Her world collapsed
early Sunday morning.

The princess tore herself upon the teeth of the window. There is now
shredded flimsy white dangling itself from between teeth,
stuck and clinging in testament to the night that she tried
to escape. She had hung a star from the waist of her gown for good luck
before she shoved herself into its mouth. Now, there is a wind
that plays it as melody and calls it curtain. Don’t try to find out her name;
you never knew it anyway. Those creatures have jumped the barricades
and have headed for the sea.

Did you know that you lost her? The roosters on your shelf
never warned you of her impending departure. They were neither
friend or foe, though you counted on them to never make a fuss
while they stood there looking gorgeous and glazed
in the sunlight, just like their eyes. Just like your eyes. While the
morning yawned and broke yellow through the window, you
never saw her coming or going. The hens
below them never clucked their secrets into your ears. That’s what
things do when you only want them to look pretty. She began to breathe,
to breathe at the thought of such freedom.

Plates never eaten upon,
mouths never lit alive to warm the chasm of days spent in the dark,
embraces that never bloomed. The yellow roses
suspended in silk upon your wall are the last things left in this house
that still look like her. The star in the window tries to light itself
to play candle against the wall that looks like a grave. Somewhere,
there is no tombstone to trade for a chrysalis; this is not
how you get your wings. Draw herself to sleep and call it Paradise,
close her mouth shut and call it ache. The window forgave her
for the lines she drew up her arm. These barricades
can only hold for so long.

Written 8/14/10
© 2010 Nicole Nicholson except for material in italics, which is © 1991 R.E.M. Athens, Ltd. All rights reserved on originial material by N. Nicholson.

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This poem was written for >We Write Poems Prompt #15: What Do You See In This Image?. The gods sent me a little birthday gift this year — a poem on my birthday. Pretty cool, huh? Anyway, I think I ended up reading a darker angle into the picture at the top of the post, which Mallery over at WWP gave us for inspiration this week. I hope you enjoyed the poem.

-Nicole

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Fear, by Nicole Nicholson

Occluded forest, the hood over my head:
green fingers folding together,
brown bark teeth in a damp musky mouth,
Bavaria’s finest. With your pen, you
cover me in red, and call me virgin:
color me blood, and call me bruise.

Fresh incense of needles dying below my feet,
snap and crackle green, evergreens casting
a princess’ path for me upon the forest floor. I walk
a virgin sacrifice from path to path: the script’s
already been written for me. I follow it
letter by letter, curve by curve: somewhere,
the sentence will end where veins intersect at the
junction underneath my breast, the tunneled mountain mound
where my heart is buried alive. The wolf
seeks to resurrect the living from the dead.

As I walk, I watch
half-moon teeth marks quiver below my surfaces
like little leviathians, backs arced and ready
to dull their hunger. This is first blood
begging for rapture before it ruptures. I am
only missing Quetzalcoatl’s feathers for this walk,
given a red riding hood instead: a replica
of the door and crest between my thighs. And

I know how this tale ends. The basket
is just a prop; so is Grandmother. The god is
wolf and serpent chasing each other,
trading pyramid for forest. Blood calls
for more blood: but you insert the woodsman
to wipe the blood off your own hands. Shall you
split open a thirsty god and deliver me? This
tale is older than you, curled up inside the code that built you,
little scaled and feathered lexicons that hiss inside your ear
and tell you how the story goes:
virgins walk the woods and come back blood. It has
always been this way.

Written 7/30/10 and 8/3/10
© 2010 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.
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This poem was written for We Write Poems Prompt #13: Little Red Riding Hood Revisited. Irene Toh invited us to revisit the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale.

-Nicole
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Stumble It!

Revised 7/20/10
© 2010 Nicole Nicholson, except for lines in italics in the penultimate stanza, which are © 1967 The Doors. All Rights Reserved on material by N. Nicholson

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This poem was written for We Write Poems Prompt #11: Automatic for the Poetry. In this prompt, I asked poets to try some automatic writing, a Surrealistic technique in which you clear your mind, enter a “receptive” frame of mind, and then begin writing — do not stop, do not edit as you write. You were to pick a pre-determined letter — mine was ‘f’ — and if you got stuck, jump down a line and begin your next sentence with that letter (I think in my case, that might partially explain my frequent use of the work “fuck”). I was a little surprised at what was hanging out in my subconscious, but it proves that the oil spill still weighs heavy on our minds.

-Nicole

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when the box breaks under the weight of moonbeams I fall in
far to the distance light
fell the trees around your head
feed the trees around your head when the levee breaks southern death begins to call, there ain’t no kind of death like water
forget what you’ve heard about water being life
fish are dying in black waters children are dying of black waters
from the fronds of palm leaves we see the distant black death coming the fires are raging on consuming sky like it belongs to them when they belong to the rumble of the belly of the earth dead and ancient dinosaur bones become water there’s a reason they stay buried we burn them to stay warm at night how do you explain apocalypses from the arms of a god that look like our own
fuck the media, they don’t know nothing
fuck the politicians, they sit on their hands and congratulate us for our concern with steamroller flat slaps like giant billboards congratulating their private envy upside their fucking heads
fuck the f-word we need something stronger than this to swallow our rage to bring oil into rage, rage into fire while birds are crying higher than Heaven’s gates
fuck you
if you don’t make a difference
if you just say too bad and then turn off the tv and sleep, cause that’s what they want
a black liquid noose around our necks while the planet is dying
Gaia don’t drink oil
birth new death through her stomach
when her water breaks it will be full of crude
this is what rape looks like, she bleeds black when she is done
fuck you
if you don’t do anything at all if all you do is scream at the politicians
where is your pen, where is your sword, where is your fucking nerve
forget that we are supposed to whisper, this is the time to scream
quit donning Thomas Jefferson wigs, quit pretending like you know what Paul Revere’s heart looked like
saving our country ain’t about putting on wigs and hose and waving signs
saving our country is dipping your hands into dirty water
looking up at the woman who bled it and promising to heal her
promising to cover the large landmark of shame, a green and yellow sun shaped birthmark that somebody slapped up between her thighs and called conquest
what have they done to the earth
fuck you if you don’t make a difference
what have they done to our fair sister
fuck you if you think this woman will last forever
under the weight of a million blacked-out suns that we disemboweled just for their oil
fuck you
we have the knives, my friend
tell us why we should put them down

First draft written 7/15/10

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Stumble It!

Jendi Reiter, poet and Vice President of WinningWriters.com has republished “Gulf Song” on her blog. Please feel free to go read the poem here.

-Nicole

Stumble It!

Look at me. I am a map. I have railroad lines,
zipped black teeth that cover five hundred miles of country
easy. Look at the graceful s-curve embossed
into my left shoulder, the straight line love
splitting me into from my navel to my
breastbone. My left leg’s been stitched back on
at least three times, the scars now a trio of
whispering trajectory curves from pubis to gluteus,
tracing their flights around my boy-toned hips. And
see the little indentations, the bite marks
circling my right wrist: that is from where
I lost my right hand back in ’94. It was reconnected
ten years later – but sometimes the fingers don’t move,
the knuckles don’t shout and flex,
and my pen lies limp.

This is the cheap way of living.
You close exits. You sew up tears.
You swallow blue lumps. You
shove oceans under your tongue until they turn to acid
to prevent their escapes. You
learn to love ratty old black thread and
sharp chrome slivered pain because
you cannot find gloved hands, a clean room, or
a masked stranger wearing antiseptic green to
repair you. You buy more black thread
with footsteps like coins, your bare feet in flight
blurred together, heartbeats that forget to touch
the ground. The shortest distance between two points
is not a straight line: it is how
you pinch the length of time between them shut
with your endless running. Problem is,
no one ever tells you that you gain those coins
by trading in your own breath.

Written 7/8/10
© 2010 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.

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This poem was written for WWP Prompt #10: Object Poems. Mallery instructed us to write a poem concerning an object: look at it from multiple angles, consider how it feels and tastes, its use, its shape, and so forth. I went a little beyond the object itself, which as you know from the title is a needle and thread. I hope you enjoyed reading this poem.

-Nicole
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Stumble It!

My poem appears in the Open Mic section of the site. To visit, go to: http://poetsgulfcoast.wordpress.com/open-mic-n-r/

Stumble It!

Move forward again: now, I am sixteen years old. I built
a new boat out of granite, marble, and
alabaster. I plundered the curves of Dionysus’ face,
ripped the congregation of curls out of Apollo’s hair,
stole Jason’s mainsail and hoisted it up on my
own ship. And when that boat sunk, I weaved
Persian carpets made out of comet tails and
buried my face inside their fire and dust. I thought
that I could breath in God, fill my lungs with something
other than spit wads, color lines, and
stab wounds tattooed on me from school days shoved into
lockers full of switchblades, all open-jawed and
hissing my name. But instead of wondering why
Black and White had to be opposites, I stuck with

questions: like why Jupiter
wore red around his waist, and if it was a contact injury
from fighting Saturn for his own manhood. I ached for
emergence, pushing against the membranes, trying to erupt
from my town’s belly like his brothers: but it was all that I could do
not to suffocate inside and then slide out stillborn instead. How do you
run from fire? You dive headfirst into books
to escape the open, bloody maw of every Saturn
around every street corner inside a town
that wants to swallow you whole. Build boats
out of your own lungs. Grow gills before you
drown. Or if you can’t, slice the sides of your own neck
and make them yourself: you’ll have to try to breathe
through the blood. If you do this, maybe you’ll live
to see eighteen.

These days, I barely tread water. I used to wonder
if I would see the world outside of that town. You must know
that there is a concrete wall between my ears, bearing all of my
scratched-out days. That is how I killed years,
with the Chinese death of a thousand cuts. Did you
dream like me? Feel your neck, and tell me
if you don’t feel the raised up, half-moon scars
where you dug in your own knife. Yes, that is
the proof. You said it best: no one here
gets out alive.

First written 11/7/09
Rewritten 4/21/10
Revised 6/28/10
© 2010 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved

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This poem is for both Poetry on Wednesday Prompt #9 (write a poem about a famous person, historical figure, etc. without naming them) and last week’s Big Tent Poetry prompt in which we were to write a question-and-answer poem, or some sort of conversational poem.

-Nicole
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Liberty, by Nicole Nicholson

i still dream of shadows
gray guards, corded necks, black walking
the stars die in their hair

there is a time when blood
folds into itself, sits and cries
subspace Prophet prayers

enterprising escape
i see whistling lights alive, sky
bruised, streaked star eyes in warp

with a throat made of tin
fold my shadows like broken hands
sing my shadows to sleep

little campground darkling
inside the belly of a ship
dreams still eat you alive

Written 6/28/10
© 2010 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.
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This poem was written for two prompts: We Write Poems #8: English Haiku, and Poetry on Wednesday #9 (write a poem about a famous person, mythical character, historical person, etc. without telling who it is in the poem). This is a chain of English haiku about a fictional character. See if you can guess who.

-Nicole
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Stumble It!

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;

when parking lot lamps like whiskey lights
strike matches in the darkness below those stars
and cut their own amber sorrowed glow with the
straight spine shadows of their steel pole bodies;

and the bottles shine and call to you,
green bottle fly,
effervescent empty like the drunk drown
that they used to carry;

and you are cleaner than the world,
and you are sixteen years old,
and you wring scars and blood out of your wings nightly
when no one is looking;

when the drought pools inside your belly,
resting below your sternum,
little ribcage light sitting atop your spleen
like a throne, the little god you throw petals to,
offer your scars like penance to,
your blood like incense to, and get back
blessings of tears like Holy water from;

that, my friend, is when the bottle breaks,
the fingers speak, and the hand screams,
wrist to palm connecting with a fluid joint
fury. There is no shriek like glass
unraveling itself onto asphalt, below whiskey parking lot
lights, below those molting trickle-down junkie stars,
at shopping cart feet round like your days
that never end and swallow themselves until
tail becomes head and you walk on the bumps of the bone,
up the spine of the Ouroboros, never finding exit. You are

still the cleanest thing alive, but
try to tell them that,
No Scars, No Blood, No Bones,
No Ragged, No Wings. Every cut, every jaw of glass
lying open and unhinged on the pavement,
is your testimony.

Written 6/21/10
© 2010 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.
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Notes:
For the Big Tent prompt, we were instructed to freewrite and then construct a poem from our freewrite with the statement, “I want to write about __________ but I don’t know how”. In my case, I chose an incident from when I was sixteen, at work at my first after school job at a local grocery store. It was already past sunset, and I’d been sent outside to gather carts. I was angry, upset, and full of pent up everything from what was happening at home. I spied some beer bottles on the parking lot pavement and…well, you already read the poem. And I grabbed four of the words from Irene’s Wordle over at We Write Poems: drought, drown, circle, and sorrow.

-Nicole
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