Tag Archives: child abuse

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NaPoWriMo Poem #5: Seventeen

The bus seems like a perfect exit
to a girl, seventeen, with a dammed-up chest.

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.
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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).

Sixteen, A Visual Poem by Nicole Nicholson (version 1)

Visual Poem, Version 1 (Click to View)

Sixteen, A Visual Poem by Nicole Nicholson (version 2)

Visual Poem, Version 2 (Click to View)


Sixteen, a Visual Poem by Nicole Nicholson (version 3)

Visual Poem, Version 3

Sixteen, A Visual Poem by Nicole Nicholson (Version 4)

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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WWP Poem #6: Bears

Rouse the fallen trees around you.
Remember how death splinters your jaw.
Slide out tiny javelins from between your teeth and
hurl them at the girl passing by.
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NaPoWriMo Poem #30: Letters to Alice

There is a crack in everything,
that’s how the light gets in.
– Leonard Cohen

I.

I first began to believe in darkness
when I was seven: it was made out of thirty minutes
spent inside of a closet. Thirty minutes
painted without light, the bowels of a mouth
that would not let me go. This was discipline,
Dad turned inside out, freeway nerves
too crowded and jammed to let little girl electricity
pass safely through. Sometimes, I am still inside,
waiting for the tongue beneath my feet to
roll me backwards down a rabbit hole –
and when I land, there will be no potion, no key,
no magic cake, and no door.
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NaPoWriMo Poem #26: Box

There is a box. It is
wooden, a mistreated servant made out of
rot and blood stains. It holds
some of my years, the ones where
the mirror looked like broken teeth and empty
bedrooms. Sycamore legs that looked like
fear, shaking and stripped of bark to show
the white underneath. Prom nights, spent at home,
full of wishes that I could emerge, full-winged, instead of
an earthbound thing, soft and hairy, many-legged, with a upturned belly
like a dog’s fear gone white and asking for teeth. And a
tattered gospel, its chapter and verse preached to me
in slaps and insults.
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Intersection

This poem was written for Read Write Poem Prompt #102: Memory Recipes.

I am about mid-way through reading Fourteen: Growing Up Alone in a Crowd by Stephen Zanichkowksy. In this book, Zanichkowksy tells his childhood story — being the eighth child in a family of fourteen, born to a hot-tempered father and an overwhelmed mother who were both physically abusive to their children. In this dark and disturbing memoir, he tells how such an upbringing affected him, leaving him living inside his head, with difficulty connecting to other human beings and a longing for a sense of a separate self away from the crowd.

In one section, he talks about the mass-produced school lunches in his house:

“I remember days I went to school without my peanut butter and jelly sandwich, because the image of the mass production of those sandwiches hurt me…Perhaps the sameness of our sandwiches was a reminder that, to outsiders, we kids were all the same, interchangeable.”

The images of sandwiches haunted me and brought to the surface of an old childhood memory. So while this poem is very tenuously linked to the prompt, I’d like to share it anyway. It is lengthy, but worth the read. I hope you walk away from it with something.

-Nicole
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I. Milwaukee, 1979

One night, when I was three, I had a dream. Dolls,
multiplied on a bus. Little goddesses, pink and fresh,
curled nylon hair tumbling down in clusters of
crazy gold waterfalls. All of them, copied from my own, until a
soulless crowd of perfect duplicates sat on the laps of
every girl under the age of five riding this cross town bus. Before this
disturbed act of multiplication, I had been sitting next to my mother,
cradled by a hard-shell bus seat – 1970 remanufactured into indigo plastic
and faded by travel, routine, and transition,
worn buttocks, worn back, worn souls. I had been holding
my doll, the only one of its kind, a smiling warm plastic girl with
blue eyes that blinked and
a red velvet dress trimmed with lace – snowflakes re-written
in soft white thread. The bus,
traveling from stop to stop:
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Echolalia

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
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