Kharon by Alexander Livtochekno

I hold coins in my pocket, refuse to drop them
into Charon’s rawbone hand;
I hold the gifts of my passage under my cloak
back from this boatman’s demand.

The hand, scrubbed white by time and tale
empty like a mouth that forgot its prayer
still waits for the change in my pocket:
yes, the hand waits for the leftovers of my life,
yawning open like a vacant ribcage,
knowing what I could not take with me.
But I still hold the change in my pocket.

No one builds a bridge over the Styx,
and no one arches a proffered back over that black river
to allow foot and wheel to wage across:
no one conquers Charon
and his waiting, hungry hand.
But I still hold the change in my pocket.

From beneath the hood of my cloak
I see my lovely psychopomp standing in the boat:
I see that fire-haired, ocean-eyed brilliant man
who dropped the pain in his chest in loose bags of gold into the river.
Charon sneers: here’s another who’s conquered him.
No little pittance of coins for him that time.
And I still hold the change in my pocket.

I stand on the bank and peer further,
pulling back the curtain of mist with my eyes:
I part the brume veil around this river
to find more rebels standing on the other side,
rebels who broke through the webbed bony finger wall of the boatman.
The tallest of them shines, with rubies embedded
like nail prints in his wrists.
Charon curses us all under his breath.
And I still hold the change in my pocket.

I turn scarlet from the fever of the revelations,
giddy and carmine from the lick of flames now
rising up beneath my cloak and behind the red door in my chest:
my red door, still healing its busted latches and cracked open hinges.
My psychopomp died trying to fix the hinges of his own door,
and the rebels across the river display their own busted hinges
and cracked locks welded back into place.
They all stand in defiance of the bony hand,
stand quietly in their insolence to the white-palmed thief
who set up camp under the nose of the gods
when their backs were turned.
And I still hold the change in my pocket.

So fuck you, Charon, for I will cross another way;
away with you, ghastly Boatman: for the other side awaits.
And I will still have the change in my pocket.

Written 4/18/11
© 2011 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.
—————————————————
This week’s prompt over at We Write Poems instructed us to come up with a prompt, and then write a poem for it.

First, I’ll explain my prompt: parallelism. You see this as a frequent device in the Book of Psalms in the Hebrew Bible. Parallelism is “a kind of rhyme, in which an idea is developed by the use of repetition”. There are two types of parallelism present in the Psalms: synonymous parallelism, which is two lines expressing the same idea, and antithetic parallelism, which involves two lines expressing opposite ideas.

Here is an example from Psalm 27 of synonymous parallelism: “The LORD is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The LORD is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?” And example of antithetic parallelism happens in Psalm 1: “The LORD watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.”

So my prompt was to write a poem using one, or both, or these methods of parallelism. I also borrowed a little from Cee Lo Green for this poem. If you know the song, you probably recognize a little of this in the poem. If not, here are the lyrics.

-Nicole
——————————————–

Stumble It!

Somewhere in an apartment above the street,
an urn falls and breaks.
The roses inside tumble to the floor and
lie helpless and unsettled among the shards of the body
that used to hold them. Their scent
still floats around them in an unseen aura
and levitates upward, touching the stone ceiling above
their heads. Below them on the street, the torn rose blooms
also waft their final songs up to a clean, vacant, and cloudless sky.
And the King walks past the dying rose blooms
to become a broken urn Himself. Groaning and struggling
underneath a wooden cross, He feels
the clay of his body already beginning to crack. Through each fissure,
the scent of roses slips surreptitiously out
and intertwines with the other fragrances calling up
from the window and the street.

Written 4/21/11
© 2011 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.
——————————————————
This poem was written for NaPoWriMo and for We Write Poems Prompt #51: Pairings. We were asked to pair two opposite things in our poems: given that this past weekend was Easter weekend, I chose the theme of life/death and roses/thorns. I hope you enjoyed the poem.

-Nicole
——————————————————

Stumble It!

The ache, the agony,
the breath being pulled out of his lungs
like ribbons by an unseen hand: they all draw
her cloak and train closer to fly over this spot. All
weave her raiment thread by thread: eli, eli,
lama sabachthani. Another thread: Son,behold
your mother. Woman, behold your son. And the final pass
of the weaver’s loom: it is finished.
The cloak, mantle, and train are complete. Death stands
on the hill, her proud, ghastly, and shadowy garments
unfurled to the sky. Behind her, the sun
turns away his face with sorrow. And somewhere, a temple curtain
rents itself like so many outer garments.

Sack cloth on the sun: ashes on the earth’s face
as fire consumes a life and leaves
the flakes of its passion at the foot of a wooden cross.
If you ask the man later about the fire, He might tell you
that He only felt ice crawling up His limbs and veins
as the world and the heavens receded. But not
right now: you won’t find Him. He has shed His mantle, and
is walking.

Written 4/21/11
© 2011 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.

water tumbles over blood,
and blood tumbles over limbs,
and limbs tumble over people tumbling over cars,
and cars tumble over boats,
and boats tumble over more water like bathtub toy fury,
and the water tumbles over the invisible hands of a child,
unseen and newborn,
surely sprung up from the new crack in the ocean floor,
the crack that smiles red once every few hundred years,
once every century,
once every decade,
once the giants stir from their sleep and make a new child knit from Poseidon’s body,
and like the call of the crawl, and of the babble, and of the walk,
it will not stop;

and like a cracked-open Earth, it will not stop;
and like a flaming power plant retching forth its guts and people, it will not stop;
and like the body counts of the dead and the missing, it will not stop;
and like fear and questions hung in the chest cage by thin wire like a wind chime heart,
it will not stop.

Written 3/14/11
© 2011 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.

—————————————————-
This was written for We Write Poems Prompt #45: Against the Grain. Some process notes:

-Nicole

——————————————————-

Stumble It!

Undertow, by Nicole Nicholson

This week over at We Write Poems I asked people to plug one (or more) of their own poems into Wordle and then write a poem using the most frequently occuring words. As I’ve been pretty busy and haven’t written in a couple of weeks, it was a bit of a challenge, but looking at my Wordle again inspired me to create the above. Blow it up, print it out, save it, rotate it, read it. I hope you enjoy.

-Nicole

—————————————————————–

Stumble It!

Mom's House by Sarah Regnier

This is no statute crying blood,
no wounds weeping from the palm of hands. The
Jesus on your wall pried himself off that cross
a long time ago, leaving nothing but porcelain and floral
in his wake. The imprint of his perfect, clean back
rises in flight, arms extended like absence as it
hovers above the rest of the bric-a-brac flying low solitude
and anchored to the wall. Her world collapsed
early Sunday morning.

The princess tore herself upon the teeth of the window. There is now
shredded flimsy white dangling itself from between teeth,
stuck and clinging in testament to the night that she tried
to escape. She had hung a star from the waist of her gown for good luck
before she shoved herself into its mouth. Now, there is a wind
that plays it as melody and calls it curtain. Don’t try to find out her name;
you never knew it anyway. Those creatures have jumped the barricades
and have headed for the sea.

Did you know that you lost her? The roosters on your shelf
never warned you of her impending departure. They were neither
friend or foe, though you counted on them to never make a fuss
while they stood there looking gorgeous and glazed
in the sunlight, just like their eyes. Just like your eyes. While the
morning yawned and broke yellow through the window, you
never saw her coming or going. The hens
below them never clucked their secrets into your ears. That’s what
things do when you only want them to look pretty. She began to breathe,
to breathe at the thought of such freedom.

Plates never eaten upon,
mouths never lit alive to warm the chasm of days spent in the dark,
embraces that never bloomed. The yellow roses
suspended in silk upon your wall are the last things left in this house
that still look like her. The star in the window tries to light itself
to play candle against the wall that looks like a grave. Somewhere,
there is no tombstone to trade for a chrysalis; this is not
how you get your wings. Draw herself to sleep and call it Paradise,
close her mouth shut and call it ache. The window forgave her
for the lines she drew up her arm. These barricades
can only hold for so long.

Written 8/14/10
© 2010 Nicole Nicholson except for material in italics, which is © 1991 R.E.M. Athens, Ltd. All rights reserved on originial material by N. Nicholson.

———————————————————————-
This poem was written for >We Write Poems Prompt #15: What Do You See In This Image?. The gods sent me a little birthday gift this year — a poem on my birthday. Pretty cool, huh? Anyway, I think I ended up reading a darker angle into the picture at the top of the post, which Mallery over at WWP gave us for inspiration this week. I hope you enjoyed the poem.

-Nicole

—————————————————————–

Stumble It!

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.
—————————————————————
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
—————————————————————–

Stumble It!

Even this door reaches for Heaven. A
perfect semi-circle arc, a bald head of cedar,
a dome crown hewn by hands like yours. I remember
your palms, how they were a perfect copy of
this door in callous and scar. How you dug into wood
and shaped it. Did you see your own body, begging for
nails, in every plank of cedar or beam of pine
that used to cross your father’s workshop floor? You must have
had an impulse to connect wood to wood and make it
intersect, turn yourself into a living tree with your
top scrapping the underbelly of a ninth hour sky. That day, she
tore herself apart and wept for you with lightning, traded
her blue veils for ash-and-sackcloth clouds that were
gray like the lump ghost behind my larynx: it has been
living there for three days and will not leave.

I have nails too, Rabbi. Thirty of them.
They sleep a mirrored sleep, those coins,
babbling softly in my purse. They cannot replace
ragged skin, the small tattered emblems of a life calling purpose
from the bodies of wood. Those tokens on your work-worn hands
whispered gentle scratches into mine when you clasped them,
on the night that you told me how I would die: you will
sacrifice the man that clothes me. Just like
the wood, you always called up art from us twelve:
we were a crowd of bearded children with
eyes affixed to your star. But I cannot supernova like you:

instead, there is a vacant field
that will hold my dying light. That light
will ease out of my body, drain out of my throat while
my star is hung from the arms of an unwilling tree. If you
ever find that tree, ask her how I exited. She will tell you that I did it
without any nails inside my wrists.

Written 6/2/10
© 2010 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved. Sections in italics quoted from the Gospel of Judas.

—————————————————–
This week’s poem was written for We Write Poems Prompt #4: Doors courtesy of Wayne Pitchko. I think this poem is pretty self-explanatory: I’ll just note that I used the Gospel of Judas, which claims that Jesus asked Judas to hand him over to be crucified, as the inspiration for this piece. I hope you enjoyed the poem.

-Nicole
———————————————————-

Stumble It!

Like I said, I am wind:
I’ve been walking this island since we began trading hours
for breath. I skip invisible skin
across the waves and bring songs
into the opened ears on this island. They call me
phantom. They call me legend. Some call me
imaginary, and the seers who spot my spirit
among the waves insane. Like you.

Yes, there was a man murdered here, and
you will never be rid of his shadow. Turn your ears
away from me, scream and sob all you
want: it won’t make any difference. The
hearing is a strange gift: a weight heaved onto your chest,
making the music dull and dim in your throat. Curse me
all you like – it doesn’t matter. You know
that I’m right.

Written 5/25/10
© 2010 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.
—————————————————–
This poem was written for Writer’s Island Prompt #4: Imaginary Friend. I wrote this to continue the story from last week’s poem, “The Key”. This is in the voice of a spirit who has been on the island for a very long time, addressed to the woman who was speaking in last week’s poem. I hope you enjoyed it.

-Nicole
————————————————————-

Stumble It!