learn how
not to flinch
the hand raised
could be hello
you look for squalls
when there is only sunshine on the waters
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Tag Archives: Read Write Word
Protected: NaPoWriMo Poem #12 — Fire Walking
Protected: NaPoWriMo Poem #11: Transition to Exit
NaPoWriMo Poem #9: Untitled Cleave, 4/14/10
| it’s the way | you blame me |
| your breath | like regret |
| smells like | broken whiskey and overdue bills |
| poor white trash | dropping from the smokestacks |
| that makes me suck in | draw in |
| mine | my belly like an empty church |
| Marlboro wind | full of the God that left us |
| magazine cowboys | that I still look for |
| I know that your arms | angels rescued from Greek tragedies |
| are made of barbed wire | Cassandra’s lips runneth over |
|
so that my fingers |
can give you apologies in unspent paychecks |
| can dance with pencils | burn everything that we’ve crucified |
| and charcoal | but they cannot make the magic |
| you tried to make this our home | that we so desperately need |
| I make mine | out of the imprint of your daddy’s shadow |
| inside sketch paper | and the shed skin of erasers |
| that is made out of mirrors | where his last name should be |
| the creek knows | you consult |
| that polluted goddess full of stink and junk | the Oracle of Steelville |
| she told me | to find |
| that there are steel screams | the crooked remains of a life gone to seed |
| rippling in sine waves | prayers |
| under your skin where | blueprints for our exodus |
| muscle should be | I look in the mirror |
| this is the poison | I see Agamemnon |
| fabulous and modern | as a woman |
| I’m sorry | I still smell the smoke in your hair |
| if you don’t like my mirror – I | build pyramids |
| just reflect | how the sun will never see |
| what’s around me | our escape |
Written 4/14/10
© 2010 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.
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This poem, a cleave, was written for NaPoWriMo #14: You Want Me to Write a What? over at Read Write Poem. Yes, it’s my prompt. I figured it just wouldn’t be right if I didn’t write for it.
This is in the same vein of some small town poems I’ve already written, for example “Litany to a Melancholic” and “The Creek”. The speaker in “The Creek” is a teenaged girl growing up in a “white trash” area of the same town and is raised by a single mother. She has aspirations of being an artist, and is very talented at illustration. She appears again in this poem — she is speaking in the left hand poem, and her mother is speaking in the right hand poem.
I hope you enjoyed this poem (or shall we say, 3-in-1 poem).
-Nicole
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Stumble It!
Poem: Crucify (for RWP Prompt #118)
Read Write Poem Wordle #118
In the handsome dark, we fumble for doubloons
lying dead on the pavement.
Little minted mirrors of gold, magenta, turquoise, emerald, and
polished purple riot like the wine soaking into the costumed madness
around us: this swirling, detonated rainbow
of beads, feathers, fire, and flesh. It is fringed, open-mouthed, and
dripping beautiful fermented stink from its lips.
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Phantasmagoria
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.
And BTW, please feel free to look at this poem over on the test blog too.
-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.
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Read Write Poem Mini-Challenge Poem #1: Sycamore
Note: If you don’t want to read the introduction, you can skip down to the poem.
This is the first of hopefully six poems written for January 2010′s Read Write Poem Mini-Challenge (to write six poems about starting over in six days). It was also written for Read Write Poem Prompt #109: Beg, Borrow, Steal, which was a Wordle prompt. I managed to use a good percentage of words from the prompt.
I normally edit as I write (or try to) — but for this one, I found myself writing without an editor, from the more unconscious part of my mind (and perhaps, by extension, my heart), and then going back and editing later. If this seems less linear, that’s why. I also ended up taking my “ash golem” from my poem “Ashes” and bringing her into this poem. I hope you enjoy.
To see other poems for this mini-challenge, click here.
-Nicole
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Drawing blanks and blood,
fertile-thighed, skin scarred, I am a
whalebone artist, carving my dreams in bone apocalypses
and shoving them behind my jaw. Wake up
when I’m twelve, and try rescue those school-day reveries
running in tape-loop, dream-sequence repeats before they
waterfall down my throat and slice vocal chords
into confetti as they fall for their own enjoyment. Thirty-three years old,
whipped into a existentialist froth, I now dare to seek
my old suit of skin that’s been hanging from the
low-bending branches of some lonely sycamore that
the steel mill in town forgot to poison. I see that it’s still wearing
pink, which I forgot how to be
a long time ago.
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Litany to a Melancholic
This poem was written for Read Write Poem Prompt # 105: Borrowed Words.
NEW! You can listen to this poem on Podbean.
The words led me to write a poem involving one of my hometowns, Middletown, Ohio. One of my goals for 2010 is to finish a small book of poems about the small town, especially those that were formed and/or grew as the result of manufacturing plants. The poems strung together will tell the story of the town through the eyes of a few key characters. This poem will (hopefully) end up in that book.
So here you go. And as always, enjoy.
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Forget that the moon is sliced by the
violence of wire smiles that dangle from
pole to pole. I know you – you notice
these things. Like how
each telephone pole itself is a
victim of modern slaughter, their dead, polished wooden husks
standing on display like
conquered corpses to line this
backwoods Appian Way. Like how
the stalks of corn bend their backs in
submission to the wind and nod their spiked blond heads
towards the city – and you might think Continue reading
I, Too, Say Amen
This poem was written for Read Write Word Prompt #101: P-P-P-Poetry. This is a Wordle prompt in which all of the words begin with the letter P. I used some of the words and added a few of my own in this poem, which is inspired by William Blake (the quote in the poem is from his work “Proverbs of Hell”), Langston Hughes (“I, Too, Sing America”), and one of my own poems that I wrote earlier this year. Enjoy!
-Nicole
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I, too, say Amen.
I am having an early Sunday morning vision
of prophecy:
our bodies slapping together,
sweat running in rivers and casting shattered tributaries
off of our skins. We are somewhere
sequestered, and yet more sacred than the backseat
of my car. We sing Hallelujahs, composed in the key of carnal –
a polyglot of grunt, hiss, and shuddering breath
against a harmony of moan,
countermelodies of our whispered directions, and a
climax of screams in fortissimo. We sound
antiphons to each other, utterances in counterpoint
as we co-create again and again. This
is worship – and I, too, say
Amen.
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Lost Man, River Town
This was written for Read Write Poem Prompt #92: Word Gems. I’ve been influenced by a lot of river songs lately, namely R.E.M.’s “So. Central Rain” and “Find The River”, and “Yes, The River Knows” by The Doors. I was also inspired to write this based on some recent events in my life. This is a long poem in six parts. I hope you enjoy the read.
-Nicole
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Me, my thoughts are flower strewn
Ocean storm, bayberry moon;
I have got to leave to find my way.
-R.E.M.
I.
He wanders,
a coin lost on the carpet,
mingled in a multitude. A flesh-and-bone moth
in search of flame. He echoes stars inside his belly
that look like the strands of Christmas lights
stretched and wound around the arms of fake trees
sequestered to these country club banquet hall corners –
tiny dots of soft brilliance,
glowing against plastic green and brown. He holds
ripe plums in his eyes – ready to burst, ready to explode and
shatter wine-stained raindrops everywhere. He walks the room,
scans the crowd – and their eyes are veiled
by husks that are made of:
grain and grapes
giving up their ghosts into liquid leisure,
decanting their death into glass containers;
blood ties
with picket fences riding those red rivers –
their intersecting joints of white and wood that whisper
neighbor in their eyes in code that only
those stamped with the name of this town
can decipher; and
their memories – tall and brick,
statuesque and green. The nearby river’s deep has
extended her arms
to cover their heads, drown their souls
in the walking sleep of absorption.
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Alive
This was written for two reasons: first for Read Write Prompt #83 (a Wordle prompt), and secondly, this is a modification of a piece I wrote for a creative writing class I am currently taking. We were asked to write with synethesia in mind. I hope you enjoy.
-Nicole
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The cardinal outside my window sings in
tones of honey – pure gold, translucent
butterscotch, and dark amber. He
is perched
on a limb somewhere in a
pre-dawn cotton fog that has
stopped being Kali but has not quite yet
turned into Lakshmi – and it
declares her insolence
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On An Average Afternoon On North High Street in Columbus, Ohio
I wrote this for Read Write Prompt #79 (also Read Write Word #18), and as you can guess while reading this, it was just as much for me to write as it probably will be for you to read it. Enjoy. (Oh yeah, I encourage you to click on the links too — your choice of during or after your read.)
-Nicole
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the bellydancing gorilla
at the corner of Twelfth and High
alternates between
large, gentle shimmies erupting from
chocolate-covered chunked mountain
muscle and
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