Years ago, the concrete poured,
the walls maneuvered into place while the contractors
cast over her face with stone: straighten up. You’ve got
nothing to cry about. Meanwhile,
her glass shatter heart had lain in magnificent crystalline pieces
just behind the giant, cold, gray barrier. Soundproof. No one outside
had heard the shivering while the workmen
took their spare tools to the lucent structure; no one outside
even knew the thing had been made out of glass
to begin with.

Each year, the river had risen, inch by inch,
until the deluge threatened
to spill over the top or make the mammoth walls
buckle. They had slowly forgotten what
they had been placed there for,
the pachyderms with brains wiped clean yet
watching the destruction happen, backs turned
while the glass ruin and dust behind them
tried to reassemble itself every few days. At the
bottom of the river, still sparkling,
faces of the remnants could have been mistaken for diamonds
dumped from a passing galleon’s bowels just before it
plunged itself to the bottom in shipwreck suicide.
Every once and again, the girl had fumbled,
reaching a tentative hand to the river bottom to
find these shards and reassemble them herself: but each year,
the bottom became harder and harder to reach.

Meanwhile, belts and curses had wrapped
their slithering heads around her legs, the woman wielding them
a Medusa, branding the girl’s skin with missives: each epistle
a thief, scuba-diver scuttling to the bottom to steal
sunken treasure. Retard. Dork. Slut. The tears had begun to stop
when she was thirteen. The river rose higher. Sometimes,
she would dive herself, either to cover the treasure with her bruised body
or drown: but meantime, Medusa had dumped her oil curses
into the water. Each time, the girl coming up for air
and shuddering in disgust at the dead, slick waste that
anointed her skin once she broke surface.

Today, the sky is a clear, unveiled face
with a sun’s eye. She checks the surface
of the river, and it speaks in
break apart, slosh together, and break apart again: no chance
to mirror the azure or the solar welcomes above her. She
tries again to plunge a free hand to the river’s bottom and
brush her fingertips against the shards and ground glass dust
lying in collection below. Before, when she used to do this,
she would pull up fingers weeping blood and embedded with
little symphonies of glass; from these,
she would write her poems.

But today, she pulls up nothing: her fingers
cannot touch bottom anymore. And her friend,
with extended arm and invitation to come home with her,
waits on the steps of the bus, which is a perfect exit
to a girl, seventeen, with a dammed-up chest.

Written 4/6/11
©2011 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.
—————————————————-

This poem is a followup to Fifteen, Paint By Numbers”, and
“Sixteen”. I am half-tempted to write a poem for each year of my life up until age eighteen: let’s see what happens with that. I hope you enjoyed the poem.

-Nicole
—————————————————–

Stumble It!

you, with a galvanized ear leading to tubules
that course straight up into your brain;

you, possessing databanks built out of flesh
humming in data process heaven just behind your bone walls;

you, who would prefer to bleed ink at every site in
the nation of punctures that live all over your body;

you, who knew what fifteen years old was supposed to look like
but found its imprint continuously escaping you no matter how much
you pulled open your ribcage and offered it landing space;

you, who found yourself standing pawn ready
while being forced to watch your own white queen checkmate slaughter nightly;

you, who read every issue of Seventeen
like they comprised an encyclopedia set of young womanhood
and trying to shove the information into a new disk partition
above your eyes;

you, who would rather stamp words on your forehead than scream;

and you, the android wearing fake pointed ears
while living with a pack of Romulans. The problem is,

the fake ears give you away. Don’t think that
the peaks of those curved eardrops, those
open skin seashells mounted on either side of your head
aren’t spelling out your inner circuitry with their points
as you walk by.

You must understand that the aliens around you
cannot read the hieroglyphics. They stare at every signature
trailed behind your temples and revealed by the curtain of your hair
and think that it is a curse, an upraised middle finger,
a refusal to wield disruptor guns and wear armor that can never fit you. And

maybe it is: but either way, you must
pull the shame out of your navel piece by piece,
yanking at the little metal chain links that protrude out of the hole
that connect you to your birth; extract the coiled up chain
that has rested below your sternum since you were ten. You know
that its linked serpent head is what strangles you while you sleep,
wrapping itself around your vocal chords,
biting at your tongue backwards until
the words refuse to leave your body. And

one day, I want to see you kneel. Chant
mantras and light holy incense before one of
the busted-up Apple IIe’s in the computer lab
on the second floor of your high school, the
make-shift monastery where you exude prayers in Chicago font
during every single study hall. And keep praying.
The words will be your way out.

Written 11/4 and 11/9/10
© 2010 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights reserved.

——————————————————————————————————
This poem was written for We Write Poems Prompt #27, in which we were directed to write a healing poem. I won’t offer any explanation this time, I will just let the poem stand as it. I hope you enjoyed it.

-Nicole
——————————————————————————————————
Follow @ravenswingpoet

Stumble It!

My bruises are in that box, too. I must make them wear poems
because I cannot stand to hear their sickness. They tell me
that I deserved to wear them because of
the dictionaries I ate and the chunks of college-level
vocabulary that I used to exhale. They tell me
that there is a broken commandment in knowing the
breadth and depth of the Harlem Renaissance but needing a map
to know how to raise and lower Venetian blinds. And they tell me that
my name is whore, and that I deserve a storm of stones because
I could not see teenage boy dick dropping out of a
yet unopened zipper: for the greatest sin
is not to walk away before the teeth unclench themselves. But
I was deaf to zippers and to intent buried inside words. This is what happens
when you are missing files in your brain.

But these days, I am wise. My breath is rotting
with fruit. I search for fig leaves still, and find none. I write
poems to cover my nakedness, but it
never works – they keep exposing me to
the eyes of all. There is a hadith inside my head
that tells me to cover up, but I cannot obey it. So I will
leave the box open now:
the bruises keep erupting onto my skin,
and those stripped sycamore legs demand dignity
and knees. My dolls are banging fists on the inside of the box lid,
screaming for exit and justice. I have a hammer for the mirror, and a
bonfire hungry for that tattered gospel.

Written 4/26/10
© 2010 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.
——————————————————–
This poem is #26 written for NaPoWriMo 2010, and for NaPoWriMo Prompt #26: Get Scrappy over at Read Write Poem. I took a scrap of a poem that I tried to write in January, and turned it into two poems: this one and “Greeting”. I hope you enjoyed the read.

-Nicole
———————————————————-
Follow @ravenswingpoet

Stumble It!

This triptych poem was written for two prompts: Justice/Injustice at Totally Optional Prompts and Read Write Poem Prompt #49: Mission, Echolalia. This deals with a rather difficult subject (child abuse) so if you’d rather skip this one, I understand. If not, read on.

-Nicole

—————————————————

Written 10/20/08
© 2008 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.

Stumble It!

http://poetryfriends.blogspot.com/2008/06/poem-by-nicole-nicholson.html

-Nicole

-Nicole

If you want a boxer, then why don’t you
go punch someone else? My skin is not
a leather casing which contains a few
million grains of sand inside! You forgot

that I stand before you as a human,
bruised, battered, sore from all the times you got
angry and I was the first one to stand
in your way. Don’t give me that bloody rot

about how I supposedly made you
lose your religion: believe me, I’ve got
your number now, and I now know that you
have no self-control. I’ve taken a lot

of abuse from you, but no more. Time’s up.
I’m not listening anymore, so shut up.

Written 6/12/08
© 2008 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.

I participated in the latest challenge on Poets Who Blog, which was to create a poem using a list of ten words (these ten words are highlighted in the poem below. The result was this poem, “Wounds”. Enjoy.

-Nicole
————————————————————————

They say time heals all wounds.
How precious is that healing
As I try to collect in into my heart and
Desperately to try avoid a role reversal -
I don’t want to turn into a monster
Like you.
Clarify for me why I should
Forgive you
Now,
For I still wear volatile wounds from your
Silent disapprovals and caustic cut-downs,
And I still remember how I used to flutter inside
When I saw your hand raised, reared back, and
Ready to hit me again.
I would escape into fantasy – books and daydreams –
To dull the pain,
To make me forget,
And to help hasten the day when my magic number –
Eighteen –
Would come up and I could leave you forever -
And I did.

But now – now you say that
You come in peace?

Get bent.

Written 5/28/08
© 2008 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.

Stumble It!

Written 4/9/08
© 2008 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.