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!

P.S. If you want to read everything else I wrote for the mini-challenge, click here.

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I.

Icicles, cracking
when the wind grows cold: battered bone, the rounded ends of
tibia, fibula, and femur. The dented faces of moons
collide with each other behind shifting knee caps
as I walk. I didn’t know knees
could protest so loudly. The asteroids that hit me
beneath skin were Lyme bacteria – I never saw
them coming. Maybe when I am sunk into the sleep of Earth, they’ll
dig up me up in fossil and wonder if
my femur bone was ever used for batting practice.

II.

Release your hard-on, let it fall back
to your curled ground without a shudder. It’s that
simple. You needn’t shout your discovery of me, broadcast it
from spires and steeples as if
folks like me never existed. I know that we
were once illegal. But we who are
painted with many colors at once – we are
born every day. We are no big surprise. And maybe
if you untangle my blood, you’ll figure out
who I am.

III.

I am dark by DNA:
north by northwest by south by east
by west by northeast. I am literal when I repeat Whitman:
I contain multitudes. Sometimes
when I stare at the brown flatlands and hills
that clothe my bones, I see the
exquisite black curls of Sequoyah’s dreams,
freehand dancing with an alphabet pen. The curls of my hair,
whipped and stripped into straight by chemical magic,
would be jealous if they saw them. Or I see Cill Airne
trying to break through, green and gray-castled,
in the buried blush that rises up to my surfaces. Or I see
steeled silver or azure cabochon eyes, punctuated by black hole pupils and
arising, blonde-topped, from the depths of Bavarian dirt. Or I see
Ghana’s gold, warm in its speech, bubbling champagne and tawny
up to my palms, or the hidden black from Kenyan shields
that my DNA forgot to switch on – whispers of regalia left behind
in a country that I never knew.

IV.

When I was eighteen, I had to issue
a writ of habeas corpus to free my brain from
the shackles of a small hometown that stole me and
claimed me only because of my chance deposit
into its arms. And I still must reissue it
from time to time:

when the steam engines between my eyes
lock up and pistons threaten to shoot forth
and explode cranial bone,

when the old lady in my head
screams dictates made out of shackles and chains,

and when I remember that I need not hide
my rainbow nature to avoid
loud bruises and cracked bones. My mind can be a dark tool
when its daggers are aimed at my own chest.

V.

Wire-to-wire messages. Hidden Morse Code
beneath my muscle. Come alive, live wire. Crackle, buzz, and pop open
your T1 lines until they scream. Awake. The light and the shadows
call you to drink it all in, transmit data
up and down your body. Rattle your caged spine,
tingle the wires, watch the impulses
branch out from your center in blue. Feel everything.

VI.

Red muscle hills remain unerupted, unexulted
underneath blankets of yellow adipose snow. I am not
carved or chiseled in arcs of fine lines. I look nothing like
the blank marble bodies once buried beneath dirt,
pale arms and legs shivering underneath
the longing of an archeologist’s fingers that bend low to the dirt
and listen for its secrets with trowels and sifters. Nobody will ever
display frozen frames of me in the
silent halls of a museum. Instead, I make a good cushion for
sudden falls and sleeping heads.

VII.

There will be no flesh-and-bone investments
in my future, no progeny to behold
from the dimmed eyes of age. Thanks to the
burnt tubal bridges in my belly, my womb remains
forever silent, echoing only with the rattles of
my own breath and voice from above the
apex of the orange chakra glowing sitting beneath
my navel. Instead,

I yield forth words
into the shattered and shocked chaos
of being.

Written 10/14/09
© 2009. All Rights Reserved.

Stumble It!

P.S. If you want to read everything else I wrote for the mini-challenge, click here.

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My blood, it tells on me. Feed the meter, and I can keep parking here
on Earth so long as I
do not keep dumping sugar into my river. I wonder if
by 2020, they will figure out a way to tell
what poisons me, to sketch out the
reprobate carbohydrate faces of my miscreants
on wanted posters in full living digital color
in the Cyclops eye of my glucometer display. Then I might see
some specifics. Maybe a
cosmoramic display of the jelly donuts,
the orders of crème brulée, the chocolate mud pies, or the
giant plates of linguini that passed into my body
without being stopped at the doors
of my lips.

But right now, it can only hint at my dirty secret:
how I occasionally tie up the bouncer
with a dash of capriciousness. You can see the mischief:
it saunters and slinks its slutty self into my wicked smile
with the smoothness of liquid vertebrae and
settles into the minor key curves that inhabit my eyes,
which are now backlit by wanton desire
spoken in tones of unchecked fire
and elusive serpent crawl. Look again, and you’d also see
devil horns sprouting from my crown, poking up past my hair –
black and slick,
striped with copper, fuchsia, and wild. The horns
compete with my highlights with their own screaming red libido,
thrusting their tips to the sky like a pair of
unchecked, curved erections. And once my Kundalini
has been kidnapped, disguised as a pointed red tail, and
slithered backwards out of my spine, I then let the insolent and irresistible
march through my doors, put their feet up on the couches,
piss all over the bathroom floors, and insult the DJ. When they
are done, they always exit slowly and quietly in small crowds
out of my body, leaving their only evidence in my blood
like an impish teenager spiking the punch on prom night. And that
is what the meter reads – samples from
the river running inside me that carries

the translation of my breath,
the proteins and traces of spirit that
reassembled themselves to build me,
and the small sugary time bombs
that tick in my arteries.

Written 10/14/09
© 2009 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.

Stumble It!

This was written for Read Write Poem Prompt #42: Catch Some Words. I actually had composed this early this morning, before I even knew about the prompt…..

I had come across the poem “Abortion Stories” when reading a book of Jim Morrison’s poetry…and then found out that the words later became The Doors’ song, “Peace Frog”. These are the words that caught me:

“Indians scattered on a dawn’s highway bleeding,
ghosts crowd the young child’s fragile eggshell mind.”

From there, I was inspired to write “Nightmare”. Enjoy.

-Nicole

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(for J. Morrison)

You were five.

This was when they still called you “Jimmy”.

You saw them scattered on the highway,
standing outside broken and smashed trucks –
some weeping, some bleeding. You begged
your parents to help them. Do something.

They called the police and an ambulance.
But you kept pleading, perhaps for the souls
scattered and shattered before your eyes,
perhaps for yourself, or perhaps for both.
Do something.

Frustrated, worn out, and perhaps exasperated,
your father then told you that what you had
seen was just a dream. A nightmare, even.

So you took that nightmare and buried it in your
skin. Buried it in your soul. You took that nightmare
and spun it into tales. Showed us the faces of your
nightmare. Some of us understood. Some of us
did not. Either way, your life became a rich, elaborate
nightmare that exhausted your mind and body. And
you projected that nightmare into the skies and
into your words.

And one night, you collapsed under the weight of
that nightmare with only a bathtub filled
with a few inches of lukewarm water
to catch you when you fell.

When you fell, the earth fell with you.

And we still can feel her shaking.

Written 8/28/08
© 2008 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.

Stumble It!

-Nicole
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crimson stains
on white petals
of fist-wide flowers
open white palms to the sky
broad, smiling, innocent
unaware that they are stained
unaware that blood has rained
upon their faces

life and death
frozen together in one moment
the innocence of the snowy petals
against the innocence of the owners
of the blood

souls gone
which beat the flowers to the corporeal
finish line
too soon
a stained September
too soon

the flowers will remember
they bloom below the windows
of Pinochet’s palace
they bloom beside the hinges
of Gaza’s gates
and they bloom in the gardens
shadowed in undertow
next to the empty lots
where the towers once stood

we must remember
that September
is not ours alone in sorrow
but lest we forget
the flowers will remember
all of these Septembers

Written 8/10/08
© 2008 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.

Stumble It!

-Nicole

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“Gethsemane”

I wrestle the cross out of my heart
So I can carry it on my back
For you. For all of you.
This painful extrication caused the blood
To flow from my forehead and pool
On the ground before me.
For a brief moment, I wish for
Angels, for uninhibited beauty –
But the cup sits ever before me,
Demanding that I put my lips
To it and drink deeply – the thorns,
The curses, the bitterness, and
Carry them in my belly with a
Cross tied to my back.
Peter, draw not your sword. Don’t try
To stop this all from happening.
For our greatest victory is yet to come,
A victory of ages that will surely be won
Once I wrestle this cross out of my heart
And carry it on my back.

Written 7/14/2007
© 2007 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.

Stumble It!

I feel for you
And for us – the whole lot of us.
I can’t walk too darkly lest
The world shakes beneath my feet,
And I stand from afar and wish
That good fortune be yours to meet.
I am on that crucifix
Outside my fair window -
But I suffice to bleed from within.

Echoes of this sad refrain
Won’t bounce off these walls
And my screams of outrage sure
Won’t save our noble cause;
But I know I’m not without cause
To bleed from within.

Written 2/8/2008
© 2008 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.