I remember writing letters to you
about broken pots and candlesticks
and mother waiting for her nails
to dry on Sunday morning in the bathroom
all alone
with coffee brewing
all alone
I remember how the chemicals were
spilling underneath the door
and we closed our eyes against the fog,
breathed corroded prayers into our fingers
they filled our lungs
and broke us down, sealed us shut
they filled our lungs
Monday morning came and went
and I held my hand across your chest, waiting for
the echoes to pulse through you
I always hated Sundays
they filled my lungs and left me
all alone
I remember writing to you
after you were gone, and you pulled the
closest thing to prayer from my breath
I ever knew
I.
In the night, with the infection of birth
still glowing in her arms rampant like a
weed under cotton pillows, she recalls
pulling violets from the front lawn and
weaving gossamer bracelets for the
moths with her fingers wrapped around
precarious creases in stems, the purple
of the petals coming undone in her
lifelines, she recalls a garden floating like
an ark to the shore of the galaxy, sails
of gristle-wood soaked in rain like a nightgown.
II.
Lightning is her blood. She has
wondered about storms all her life and
why the rain felt so electric
in her dreams, in her toddlerbones.
III.
Ten years too late, she finds solace in
thrashing rain, in cold water squeezing its
hands around her waist through cotton sheets,
sliding its calf muscles across the sides of her knees.
Solace in memory. Stained glass fragments.
Flowerbed in the windowsill. Aches.
growing pains plunging deep into shins. She is learning
to count the seconds between light and
sound, between sleep and
dreams, before the echoes of thunder
have reached the roots of her
childhood and shaken windows with
curtains drawn closed-eye and black.
IV.
An empty street never looked so grey
or wet or rang with the cracks of an old
storm like the ones in the folds of her
blankets. There had never been this
many pansies at her feet. And violets she
had called them. Violets, not pansies.
Queen Anne has left cobwebs in her room
under curtains and in the places
she never used her broom, and through
the clouds of smoke her amber tip glows
illuminating ash like rows of nameless crop
suspended in the embrace of an illusionist
Queen Anne used to trace the ridge of God’s brow
with the heel of her thumb as if
she were sweeping the minute hand past the hour
and she has left her kingdom go to dust
let spiders turn to spectacles in pots and pans
spinning silk lines into rust
Queen Anne has sewn her fingers
like a cross-stitch over fields of lace and
learned to read the worry lines
aching in her face as deep as Mississippi
and the way she holds her gaze
keeps June at bay for just another day
Queen Anne has cut the seaming from her stem
and set herself in flight like a transatlantic jet
and we see her trail of smoke dissipate
at quarter after ten fading
white to green until next time
until then
The sea is sick. He has been in bed
for days with his shores
shrugged up around his neck, translucent
with cold sweat. He rolls the embroidered
edge between his fingers, churning sand
into his palm. I turn on the bedside
lamp and he cringes, turning away
from the sun and infinite seagulls
beading down his forehead. A nurse
stoops over, applying petroleum to the
cut above his brow—it glistens white
and antiseptic on the dock stitched
to his skin in shades of swelling
ironwood. He coughs, expelling a mound
of seaweed and nautilus bodies from
his lungs, washes them up onto his cheek, and
I hear his chest slosh as he heaves, roiling the
engine, and he sponges the foam from
his lips, falling back against the
pillow, darkened. Something muddy in him
dislodges, splashing against the transient
membranes of jet stream sifting through
his core, and I can see the waves curl
under in the spot when he glances
sideways and grabs my hand.
And I can see how the poets fall in love
with the sea, with every barnacle he
picks from his chin, every cold
current busting through his arm like a vein,
every dead reef and empty oyster.
I straighten his covers and pick a shell
from his palm like a piece of lint. His
temperature has skyrocketed and he is
restless, tortured, his kneecaps are
thick and aching, pulsing with saltwater,
and they want to pull him through
the halls in his hospital gown. There is a
profound rasp in his voice, a grating-against
that tells me there is something
worth saying, and he spits out a
whisper that is absorbed by the shuffling
of his oxygen tank. The sea is
sleeping, recuperating from his
convulsive dry hacks, his lethargic
tide breathing quiet into his sheets, his
mouth fluttering as he dreams. I
turn the lights out and leave him be.
His room is flooded with the solitary
caress of a lighthouse sweeping
across the dark, the palpable mist
illuminated for a second before all eyes
turn away.
You become a poet when you cry, you
are Homer, blinded by your tears, you are a prophet.
You will take a bouquet to the intersection
with the blanket of constellations embracing your
shoulders, settle their stems at the base of
the stop sign. You pull your hair into
the best bun you can manage, and you can’t.
Poet, rest your epic in my palms, I will
trace your lifelines. Poet, you are dialing
his cell phone just to hear the voice recording and
the beep chopping off into silence, you will
give him your messages from the rubbed
corners of your eyes.
REM Stage 6: A Poetry Blog || julie niklas 