by: Nicole Callihan
In these gnomic, dream-like poems, Nicole Callihan offers a constellation of self, landscape, and language, all of which interpenetrate each other, offering wisps of narrative as elusive and fragile as experience itself.
Encompassed
East of the mouth
A supermarket light
The dream
I push you in a cart
And we scream
Children
Our middle-aged bodies
Liven in the dusk
***
The violence of violets
West of the navel
Down south
I’ll find you
All filled up with rain
***
On a train headed north
Among my belongings
A bag of oranges
Heavy in my lap
My gift to you
I’ll eat it all up
Before the grief kicks in
Loose
Fifty cents a lucy
Fifty cents to unloose the self
Is to unloose
That which may be lost
Unlawfully leased
Inarticulately loused
(See: the black comb)
And later lying laying
Is it which
To lie to lay
The indirect object is which
Which is the indirect object
The lucy itself
Herself
Hirsute
To live among those
Is to live unlonesomely
The Missing Ring
Ankle-deep in the clover,
my girls and I hunt not for the symbol
of the thing but for the thing itself,
flash of sterling and diamond
in the grasses, the exchanged thing,
that which a decade ago
I stood greedily accepting among
the ranunculus and just-parted skies,
how the soul offers herself up,
how I took the name as if it were my own
and wrung it round my finger,
a child tying a ribbon to remember,
and memory itself a lopsided thumb,
a paging through all the seasons,
and so spring is come again, and what
could I do but put the ring in my pocket,
a safekeeping that isn’t safe, a hole
worn through by the materials that mark me
as mother and wife, less seldom as woman,
but as woman too, and losing it,
do I lose everything, do I lose nothing,
do I lose that moment some fifteen years gone
when sitting in a well-lit room, he told me,
breathlessly, that I have such pretty feet?
Solitude
“The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot be.”
— John Ashbery
On Partridge Hill Lane,
I wash the bowl twice
and take my thumbnail
to the dry raspberry jam.
The bend in the road
is as sad as the poem
as sad as the house,
my body, this mind,
peanut butter in the trap,
the mice in the walls,
the fat in my thighs,
my daughters’ humming.
Things I want to be mine
aren’t mine. Things I don’t
want to be mine aren’t mine.
I can hardly lay claim
to this life. Even blame
has moved from the shaft
of morning light to shadow.
Nicole Callihan’s books include SuperLoop (Sockmonkey Press 2014), and the chapbooks: A Study in Spring (2015), The Deeply Flawed Human (2016), and Downtown (2017). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Sixth Finch, Plume, Painted Bride Quarterly, The American Poetry Review, and as a Poem-a-Day selection from the Academy of American Poets. Her next project, Translucence, a dual-language, cross-culture collaboration with Arabic poet Samar Abdel Jaber, will be published by Indolent Books in 2018. Find her on the web at www.nicolecallihan.com.
