This poem was written for Read Write Poem Prompt #114: All Over The Map. I decided to continue the narrative that began in “Endgame” and continued in “Emmaus”. The words led me to a dream sequence experienced by the character in both poems; it is constructed in three Six Sentences pieces with two short interludes in between. I hope you enjoy the read.

-Nicole

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I. A Dead God’s Chest.

Your mind unfolds, tumbling out jewel-wrapped candy like a cracked-open piñata minted inside a pirate’s fiction. This is the stuff of little boy and girl pretend, of cinemascope phantasms dreamt alive in the dark. It is made out of crowns, galleons, doubloons, and blessed by curses like the clown-painted Aztec god grin baring teeth at you from the face of an underbreath promise: take my treasure and you die, mortal. You laugh like the sunset dancing diamonds upon the water that holds your ship aloft, but a sword swishes wet and red in your ear, drawing its double-dog-dare-you onto a blueprint that looks just like your neck. It’s the eggshell crack that you never hear until your boots break through a wretched, open floor. And on the way down, you will see those boots embedded inside that grin, lodged between eyetooth and incisor as a testament against you, just before your back splits apart upon Hell’s floor.

II. Interlude.

fade to blue
fracture your eyes open
peer through the slow sting of waking and check the clock
watch burning red digits in the darkness
(2:05 A.M.)
wipe the wet from your face
wonder if it was sweat or the ocean that baptized you tonight
and go back under again

III. Eli, Eli, Lama Sabachtahni?

Your prayers are your hands, turned with palms up and lightly cupped like dying lotuses. They’ve been nailed to the desert floor – you are affixed to your own death by a single, thin, rusted spike of iron driven through each hand. Lubricious, the nails revel silently in the steady fountains of flood that your palms offer up as a last chance for absolution. Panic sits in the seat right below your ribcage, turning green, cold, and qualmish deep within your core. Beneath your belly lays the desert floor adorned with crumbled dust in red, peach, and gold; it pushes against you, an arid earthen barricade refusing the sick green terror trying to flow out of your stomach. And since you cannot leak it out, it will force your blood to keep escaping you in penances and black-veiled novenas that will parade in processional after your casket.

IV. Interlude.

break surface
sit up and shove the covers away
wonder if you really did scream
listen for the crash of its echoes against your walls
check the clock again
(4:07 A.M.)
shudder
inhale to chase the demons out of your own throat
restrain your armies of tears
and go back under again

V. In The Temple

First, you toss lit joss sticks at your little clay gods, your idle idols, like sweet sticks of TNT to detonate your broken bottle prayers; they stare at you, wordless, with stone eyes and open grins. Next, you crumble to your knees and press your cheeks against cool stone to relieve the fevered longing that still burns in your face. Then, you push the arabesque of the green jade temple floor into your forehead like a rubber stamp from God, hoping to imprint into your mind the memory of what they last told you before you exited the Throne Room and dropped your whole self into this body. After that, you hear the crackle of water tumbling itself in nimble time over the rocks outside; you rise to your feet and follow the sound to its source. Breaching the glass door threshold, you walk into the clean, leaf-fringed garden and kneel at the feet of the little child of water that pools to a stop in the center. You reach out with one hand, slide your fingers into the water, and then you remember what your last instructions were: above all else, never forget to forgive yourself.

Written 2/17/10
© 2010 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.

Stumble It!

-Nicole

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I watch alien armies of metal men raise
morning above the mist, which itself floats
delicate and dangerous above the freeway. They are
lined up, perfect poles stuck in stationary, rooted in
the cement wall that splits this asphalt in two. First, a line of
grey dancers, poised with arms in a double arc like
wings spread. They hold a yellow streetlight in each palm like a
pair of strange pale eyes above the freeway. Ahead of them,
in single file, the sentinel sadhus: thin like death, each holding
a lantern high above their headless necks with a single curved arm
like an upside down question. Truthfully, those arms are
not even curved, but rather hard and angled like
c-clamps trying to hold on to pieces of the sky, which looks like Mars
in grayscale. It’s frozen, heavy, and February – and has
forgot how to be spectrum, how to
smear blood, orange, violet, and turquoise to
greet the birth of day. Then I remember: this is Columbus, Ohio. They
haven’t invented color yet here, except for an
eye-bruising shade of football scarlet to match all this
gray.

The upside down questions above the necks of
those light post holy men betray my own mind. I know that
crucifixion is the easy part: you drink until the demons
stop dancing in your skull. And when they
come back to build bonfires behind your eyes, you
drink again. And again. And again. You keep drinking
until the nails bury through your hands, your feet. And you
stay up there, on the wood, turning your throat inside out to bake it
bare, parched, and clean beneath Death’s sun. But resurrection
is the tough part. I know that somehow, I rose from the dead
back in Arizona, wrapped in hospital linens. I’ll never know
who found me lying face down in the cradle of Monument
Valley. I’ll never know who took me down, who pulled me away from the
teeth of the wood of my cross. But I still drag an invisible cord
with a severed and crying neck behind me – it was ripped
out of the desert floor. I am a walking ghost. I have
the nail prints in my hands to prove it.

Now, on this bus, I am tracing
the road to Emmaus into my brain, watching the steel and light pilgrims
dance as we pass them. I lean into the elbow, into the
crook of the arm of my window seat on this bus. The window glass
plays cold and frosty against my cheek, bearing the fog
of my breath on its face. We’ve just crossed the outerbelt, and I
pull myself away from the gentle smoke of sleep. We
pull into the bus station in ten minutes, and my
uncle will be waiting for me. I wonder if his arms will be enough
to hold me, a worn out rag doll, disinfected and fresh
from ninety days of rehab. Some nights, I still dream
of the dust of that desert.

Written 2/1/10 and 2/3/10
© 2010 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.

Stumble It!

This darkness in our collective mind film,
This darkness bubbling from our cistern,
This darkness, a black ink swallowing the overhead sky
As we lent him our mortality and he hung there to die.

He lent us not back revenge or sorrow –
But new life, new hope, and another tomorrow.

Written 3/18/08
© 2008 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.

-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!