Westerville, Ohio: Rock the ‘Ville is looking for published authors, poets, and illustrators for its August 10 event. Auditions will be held on June 4. Click on the flyer below: the image will appear as a JPEG. If you cannot view it, click on the link below the image to see a PDF version of the flyer.
“A Zealot” (first published here on Raven’s Wing Poetry) won first place in the adult category in the 2013 Worthington Libraries Poetry Competition. The winners were announced on Saturday, April 27 at an open mic reading at the Old Worthington Library, 820 High Street, Worthington, Ohio.
The first, second, and third place winners in each category read their poems and attending poets were invited to read on the open mic. In addition to “A Zealot”, I also read “Candles”, the second poem I entered into the competition.
The winning poems were also included in an online chapbook published by Worthington Libraries.
I will be posting a video of my reading of “Candles” at the open mic soon.
-Nicole
Grief has stolen the words
from my throat: and I want to burn
candles in their places. Little white tapers
to take the place of every word purloined
from my voice box, white candles
to stand as silent sentries for every
morpheme that refuses to march up
my tongue and out of my lips. Those words instead
want to pull my tongue backwards and
curl up inside its rug for warmth and
safety. They want to duck behind my
stained and crooked molars, out of sight
from the open air and the wind that passes
in and out of my mouth.
Continue reading
Helen stands alone, drenched
in the ink of midnight punctuated by a few faint stars
and a proud, brittle moon sitting as the
unveiled and defiant queen of this landscape. A black
and unknown bard emerges from behind a fragile veil
of shadows: she almost recognizes his face,
a carved brown rock monument of deep lines and curves,
from the page of a book she’d read in high school. You will
need this to see and hear, he says as he
reaches a long bronze arm above his head
Continue reading
Dear Nicole: I might come to you as a
prayer, wrapped up in silk. Your best and brightest
hopes wax like unbidden moonlight
in my belly as magic that can quench the fires
that singe skin, heart, and soul – for we were
meant to burn, but not to immolate ourselves
with anguish. I might raise my hands to the sky,
trying to heal broken temples stone by stone,
bone by bone, and relight the lamps inside of them
that have been bled dry of oil and whose flames
have long since died. I might come to you as a
Continue reading
They lived on Seventeenth. The Negro
steel mill workers, these new men recruited
by ashen-coated promises of gold moved into
these little one-story brick boxes with their
families: and Helen’s was no different. Helen
Continue reading
The heels of Helen’s feet –
smooth brown apples in the sun
gravid with forbidden knowledge –
do not need wings. Humans are not
supposed to fly, but she will. She just
doesn’t know it yet. She’s running
Continue reading
Helen R. Jones watches the sun
crawl up the back of the sky. He smears a
trail of persimmon, gold, and cinnabar on
its sacroiliac; a small strip of lapis lazuli skin
peeks out at the world just above its waistline. She
has seen this happen at least sixteen thousand,
seven hundred and fifty times, give or take a
week or two’s worth of the missing the occasion.
