Girl Descending and other poems
Nicole Tavares
when the cellar seeps of must
must me be down there
underneath forever abandoned
a squatter in a pink building
I to U to O my tongue feels
a soggy stick forcing
a girl’s name onto an earth, a nursery
rhyme a dark and wet without
alphabetical order how to make from a piece
of gum a hollow belly stuck
when I had been a pressing she
on a bladder now my ear is a now
to the door yellow streamers dropping
from under a dress I won’t remember how
she ends this urging has she let it
go? I am stuck here mother must be might
be wobbling upstairs in the shower
a salt that cleaves into crystals
then settles for the bottom of a house,
a mountain I want to catch her
fill myself in a chamber
along my skin I can’t sink in cement
and she can’t cleave this nail see-through bone
water wobbles in the well spring
don’t flood me mother, down here-
and then, the water forever
drops here, I am her lips part
red walls separating from the ceiling
and water stains the white above
I think she must always be
up there humming to herself
and the urine from her own burro
she rode above the earth feeling
each wobbly step move down from home
a gold river rich with warmth and waste
runs off my knobby trees who just need
to drink their own water
every puddle begins bottomless
when forget dressed as a cloud lets go,
and a girl who drops her body, a jug
topples crying and the silence makes a
Narcissus, Narcissa
Light shimmies off her elastics
frizzing my vision. What contact all a blue
all on my own. I don’t know I’m not
clear. Breath, such a tease!
Air blind, willful, all alone, then, night
leans over, plunges
this skirt, studded, rippling
gathers her up a body, choked up stem.
Face it, you’re not like those other ones
who this lake undresses outside lapping in—
I can’t look, can’t help myself
any more. I’m a witness
to water playing the swamp
gargling down the moon
milking that moon for what it’s worth—
There, I am! My flower, my dark afro
and is that you pistil welled
in my throat, is that you—
brushing up against my style?
Lick the shore
my wet lily pad, undo its locked hem.
My denim pockets bed
profiles of men. Why can’t I make
a wish, throw out their reflections
and fall face first in?
It’s too late for back
pedaling, swans are common and hollow.
At dusk, brides and grooms slip in-
to drag their feet, vow not to drown.
Plato’s Cave: The Women’s Restroom
We, shadows, the beginning
no, whisper: we are shadows’ beginning,
love experiments in the night lavatory.
Sleep escapes our dreams, headless heads us
to the restroom, where puppets wash light into limbs.
Skins begin to tag against our beating
shirts, shifting the textures of ancient
ground in pearl dirt. Hands lie tense, glaze over,
tile against the stone ages, this first time against
the shadows suffocating our wet black spaces,
We stretch our separate, joints connected crack
like grout gone cross or crucifix.
What moves our torsos, toward us darkness
toward the smooth counters
closing in like book covers
inside the told story tomorrow:
young women washing double-in the sink,
in the tub-the body cavern pink—
Where were we? Where were our twin
beds, that restlessness our home?
The men’s restroom was the other in-
side wall. How we embrace
ourselves around our concave waists of world, a chain
unlocks the pressure of running
water— O. Stalactites. Stalagmites. Stiff predictable,
braille against new history. We are the shadows,
the beginning, dream graffiti:
It’s more the women who understand the lagoon
Says to itself,
watch me hold more. Says to itself,
(,,) all night I needed boundaries, love.
I was scared of being the ocean.
—Brenda Hillman
Bright On the Beach
she shoots me her
tripod of naming
New York-1 and The Russians-
my understudies in outside
in single file
the outlanders walk the planks
emigrate from Coney Island
kiosk kiosk:Kiev
the lens interrupts my signal
a dark pressure pacing
petitioning the Black Sea
I must be a pier
can she rescue me anon-
virgin, wrecked native
a documentary of broken
from a 16mm volcano
like the Crime an peninsula
she annexes homesick
directs me as a glow
brings out a haze
a streetlamp stands by
igneous lover-less
unstaining dark’s lost-ness
in a beacon of hot
orange embering
I am loosing
a film a salted heart
in wave after wave breaking
bye my audience of Old Country
of domestic cigarettes
lit like a lava without
falling and communism-
the air swells up
blistered tearful-
ness: an unsated monster
she wipes away the lens
so sailors in tall ships
a bottleneck of fog
and vodka won’t do
to look at me
what length is
longing tided out
washed rung a love muck
shore clean with refuse
sea’s passive-aggression is
the danger of erosion
but deposition—
once a sand was just an a
a volcano with hot bay windows
loch-nessed shut
and I can’t stand
to wear myself along
splaying my toes desperate
to hang on to something solid
a dark pressure skirting a window
splicing together alien passports
always this pressure to blow up
the dead sea reels
burying the city -ex
Nicole Tavares is a Brooklyn writer of Cape Verdean heritage. She received her MFA from Hunter College in Poetry. Her poetry and non-fiction are featured in Heliotrope, Phantasmagoria, Collective Endeavor, The Fader, and nycBigCityLit.com. Her poem “The Hook: Crochet’s Learning Curve” was a recipient of a 2005 Pushcart Prize nomination. She was a co-winner of the Mary M. Fay Award in Poetry and the first prize-winner of the Edith Goldberg Paulson Memorial Prize for Creative Writing. She teaches GED, ESL, composition, creative writing, and crochet classes in New York. She also is a copyeditor and contributor to Fandata Magazine, a publication dedicated to the Cape Verde Islands and its diaspora. She can be contacted at sodades@yahoo.com.
Photo Courtesy of morqueFile.
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Poems Copyright © 2006 Nicole Tavares. All rights reserved.
