Poetry Suite by Nicole Rollender
“An urn of salt mixed with bright ash. Someone knocks inside me –”
Poetry by Nicole Rollender
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THE DEAD IN THE HOUSE
The girl’s hands held the ghost in her sleep. The ghost
said, Don’t wake up. Don’t. Don’t set the table. There are many
places I’ve never returned from, my spirits still hovering—
one on a train to Amiens, writing her long cursive name
in a fogged mirror, another’s feet in the stirrups, forcing
a baby down into this world. There are centuries of women
who cut into a goose’s belly, gashing with one hand, touching
unsent letters at their breasts with the other. The light reveals
the sweet smell left after every field burns. My mother once
said water consumed the whole world. Imagine going under
beside the ark’s bruised wood, begging for the stink of animals,
even the hand of the person who scares you most. Because
I was born in the year of the dragon, I’m fated to talk too much
and destroy the lives of any men I kiss or deliver. A shadow
speaks its own language in my memory: The girl was me
and the dead were already in the house. It was hard to know
which among us was the phantom—each of us without a home,
some on the earth-side of a deep sleep, some sleepless.
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FURY
Should I mourn the life that’s no longer mine, now the orphan
birded away, the one bound up with no chance to fly?
Or, my unstitching of the belly. Because traveling inward
isn’t safe travel. I contain burning. Sister, you say
I was born to bear someone else’s limbs from sternum
to pelvis. The babies stacked like wood, talk kind. Talk in flesh.
Tell me my hips contain God’s tongue. I carry the long-
limbed woman I was against my breast bone, her short and loud
life flown beyond what these hills will lose. What visitation,
men following a star, cloven hooves bent into dirt, will I conjure?
An urn of salt mixed with bright ash. Someone knocks inside me –
tell me the uses of my body are holy. Because we carry the living
and aren’t afraid. My son’s habit of keeling me, his spine’s wail taking
me down through the pitch and fro, oh, I hold the souls
of the other women I have lived, lexicographers gathering new
names of the dead who’ll walk in tears again. They flame, they
raise their skirts, asking what it is that they’ve come back as,
women who rock themselves, sliding their newborn hands
into the light.
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Psalm to Be Read While My Daughter Sings in the Bath
That’s when I catch myself in the mirror: not the girl I remember:
the elegant-boned: the high-jawed: dark olive tree: the righteous: she
doesn’t share my herniated discs: my sinking: I was the girl to fall in love
with: the body that would be loved enough to make my daughter: her arms
& legs in motion among the suds: voice high & pitchy: but so sorely beautiful:
I’m not the girl who: spread out in bed: black hair rolling down her back: night-
hollows under her cheeks: bones so loud you could hear them in the next
room: I miss: I miss her: so much: so much I can’t answer my daughter when
she calls: Mama, Mama, the ocean fits in here: I can swim to world’s edge:
even though she knows the flat map is an out-of-date-idea: the kracken,
the mermaids swimming where the land ends: their colors fading into sepia:
they charm her, their fins & beguiling eyes: the mirror I wish to fade back
in: into my life: all the sag and bloat: years of child-raising: my crows-feet
would fade: that my daughter, all her lightness, her water song: her float
and mirth: her joy: fill me, please, again: fill me: light entering through
the window: as if this scene an Old Master’s: suds glinting with prisms:
delight: if I turn back into this life: if I return: if my body can rise.
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Psalm to Be Read After My Husband Says Goodnight to Our Daughter
This man chiseled beside me: not even the dead & their night terrors can evict him
from sleep’s slow hum: I envy: he conducts his days so: satisfaction with how he
fathered: worked: smoothed back her hair: enraptured her with etymologies opening
in his hands: lullen: hush, send your secrets to the trees: lulley by, let’s say good-bye
to the day: it’s no more, only in our pollen-laden memory: lulla, night’s spindle:
lolati, he pretends to move her bed to and fro: he asks what she’d name the red-
headed woodpecker they saw today: what kind of gazebo would grow best into
the yard: what smell (tea leaves & oleander) did the quick evening rain bring:
hushaby, hush: my day-moments nestle in my curved collarbone: in what’s dark
&: their mutter: if I shift the intersection of our bodies: his arm may droop over
my back: his steady, tea-kettling warmth: in this small kindness: I may fall asleep:
the way my daughter & my husband know to go: to forgive the body: to let go
my need to forgive at all.
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Header image courtesy of Philip Munoz. To view a gallery of his paintings on NAILED, go here.
Nicole Rollender’s work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New Poets, The Journal, Memorious, THRUSH Poetry Journal, West Branch, Word Riot, and others. Her first full-length collection, Louder Than Everything You Love, was published by ELJ Editions in December 2015. She’s the author of the poetry chapbooks Arrangement of Desire (Pudding House Publications, 2007), Absence of Stars (dancing girl press & studio, 2015), Bone of My Bone, a winner in Blood Pudding Press’s 2015 Chapbook Contest, and Ghost Tongue (Porkbelly Press, 2016). She has received poetry prizes from CALYX Journal, Ruminate Magazine, and Princemere Journal. She is editor of Wearables magazine and executive director of professional development for the Advertising Specialty Institute; she holds a bachelor’s degree in Literature from Stockton University and an MFA in creative writing from Pennsylvania State University, where she taught rhetoric and composition and creative writing courses for several years.