April 2011
1 post
5 tags
Little Ghost
I don’t remember what happiness is. I don’t know if I’ve ever been happy. I think the only times I come close to being happy are when I embrace my sadness. I think of my body four years ago. I’d knock back half a bottle of pain pills and lie on the ground in the dark, carving up my body and touching my blood and floating away. I always felt like their were two of me, a body and a ghost. A...
March 2011
4 posts
6 tags
Over-eager got my stomach pumped, still-faced and taciturn and all the people stumbling around me, my mother walked her fingers along my forehead like butterfly kisses.
I felt I could breathe fire, spitting up bursts of fuel, launching my guts out of my body like fireworks and everybody terrified of me, a dragon bloodthirsty, unconcerned and losing her mind.
I have the impression of being drawn...
3 tags
First day of spring I keep thinking about the end of autumn -Basho Matsuo
I want to look at the world the way a bird eats a berry, to hear the perfect sound of a bluejay again and beat my heart along with the spring. You knew me better as a cardinal on a backdrop of snow. Here I am now
broadly disappointed and biting in half these moments like inevitable fruits. They split and whisper of a soul...
5 tags
The Machine That Changed the World
Here’s the thing about God.
I don’t believe in Him or It or Her or ‘all at once’ or ‘ever-present’. I don’t believe in unwavering faith and good-intentioned prayer. I don’t believe that doubt will hurt you, and I know that our false idols help us save ourselves.
But it’s possible that because every scarecrow has its purpose so do I.
Dear God, I...
3 tags
The Day of the Weak
You don’t get to make the clocks or keep the time, you only get to define what’s yours. From the frame of your body, that screaming fabric, the big heart beats. Who are you without it and what’s killing you now?
You might end up alone or confused; but there’s no use for a big heart if you have a weak soul.
[© 2010 Sophia Nelson]
November 2010
1 post
4 tags
Starfish
love in these times during these days when everyone is breaking down and breaking out and breaking news you’ve already lost our interest and the disasters keep accumulating slow starfish creeping cross to collect the rent it’s not the absurdity but the suspense and who else is feeling that tense knot in their shoulder blade like dollar bills for sinew and centennial quarters pushing against the...
October 2010
3 posts
3 tags
Pisces
If I could wish myself away I would. As the beating heart of a star folds into herself and disappears so am I, water lost in the sea and rushing waves that break on the shoreline. I always try to swallow my world in gulps of air and headlong sprints with palms outward. I could be part of it all and gone too, fused with an ocean that lets me be alive and dead all at once. I stand instead, pink and...
2 tags
Star
I was so lost when I moved to this city, willowing and wide, dirty like a dial tone. I thought I’d find out the truth, like when we got into that car crash in the parking lot. I knew what was important, what was true, when I felt the blood pool up above my eyelid, and you swore and slammed your fists against the steering wheel. I remember thinking about stars and solar systems and the lights on...
2 tags
I Think I Might Be Nearing Sainthood
“I love you exponentially.” A sentence invented for him alone. A kind of gift, for someone that doesn’t exist, not really. In my mind, we stretch under the tropical lung and read all day long. I kill the world when I see you. Dimly I might remember your face, in the flickering light of someone else’s fireplace. I will remember how I wanted to be wearing...
September 2010
4 posts
2 tags
Loser
I’m not into the lawns being mowed or graves being dug. I’m just into getting tongue and smoke-free lungs. My father was ashamed of me, covered in tattoos I inked his name behind my ear and said, “Daddy, some you win and some you lose.”
[© 2010 Sophia Nelson]
2 tags
Good-bye
Others may abandon me over the years. I might have to say good-bye. But to you, my lips would barely whisper the word, so that you might have to ask me to repeat myself several times. And when I whispered it again, I’d say each syllable in a decade’s time, so that you might still be waiting there with me as years pass by. I would pause on the hyphen between “good” and “bye”, so softly so long,...
3 tags
Love: A Dissection
You can lose love, carry love, see love, hear love, paint love, know love, have love, give love, need love, and peel the love off the walls and keep it in a jar or make a snowball out of love and throw it into outer space.
It’s a common misconception that you can fall in love, but really love can fall into you….and then fuck your shit up.
Love squeezes through you until you really do fall....
1 tag
Let's Not Pretend We Are In Love
I never burn bridges, but there you are lighting that match. Hotter than hell, hear those bells in the distance. Hear those echoes detach. Are we just anybody? Any body, take me. Dreaming through it all, my legs two fish. Any fish. (Wake me.) Pull me to the bottom of the river. Hotter than hell down here.
[© 2010 Sophia Nelson]
August 2010
1 post
1 tag
June 2010
22 posts
1 tag
Please take a second and recommend Gravity Works. →
4 tags
Giving Up the Island
There are words sweating from my fingerpads bleeding underneath my nails like the pooling of a bruised toe. Our stage is set and I’m afraid I might do something dangerous in the name of poetry. We’ve named our children after all our favorite songs. We’ve given up the island. (All we’ve ever wanted.)
[© 2010 Sophia Nelson]
3 tags
Notes On Her Obsession
plastic. you look like you should be bled of the oil spilling off your tongue in great stains. slick in your smiled photographs and cruelly captivating in your two-dimensional ugliness. a tar surrounds you, whose sparkling teeth catch flies in the cracks. vultures are scavenging birds, feeding mostly on the carcasses of dead animals. like an owl in a glass case. like a wren behind a window....
2 tags
what is this success, glowing friendly in my palm like a lightning bug? what is it now that must come gently to me? what peace is left to sidle from right shoulder to left, closing the lid of each eye?
[© 2010 Sophia Nelson]
3 tags
Sunflower
Whether both eyes open or none, I see the light pull off you ripples pulling off a great splash of fire. A glow in the night not made by the moon. I become a candle by your touch. I am not lit by the stars, my breath a little shorter in the inhalation of you, my body a torch in the dark. I spent my days picturing your body in the dim heat of my cigarette. An obsession with the burning in my...
2 tags
Passage
I. Like water lost in the sea, I never see myself more than a fleeting second. I never know what may be there inside the mirror, except a shadow stretched across the glass. I stop taking the pills. A person can’t move past the things she hates, and I hate the darkness. Since I was young I’ve hated the darkness. II. As a child I used to have a dream about a lady with no face. She freezes in the...
3 tags
Nightmares
It’s taking me twenty days a week to find the things I keep losing. The memory loss is the worst part, trickling down like heavy metals in the body leaving the mind. Like I woke up one day and forgot Latin. Like all the copper in my brain just vanished. The enlightened bits of poetry I find in the day fail to emerge due to the lack of sleep, but it’s my attitude towards what lurks in the dark that...
2 tags
2 Year Anniversary/Heat
the noise from the last parade is rising up in me like molten rock, this last heat wave crushing my breath this last summer, the final stick of wood placed on the pile the stars we wish on have been dead for thousands of years fiery explosions pre-dating me and you and us we burn off our fingerprints in the bonfire so we never have to suffer the same knowing of another so no one can name us again...
4 tags
And Then
In my mind there is this place where everyone I know is dead. And I’m alone. And nobody is asking me questions. Nobody wants anything from me.
But I’m also sad. I’m more than sad. I’m desperate. I’m crazy. I’m so unbelievably heartsick I feel like vomiting. Because I can’t stand to be without him. Because the thought of his death rips my soul apart.
I imagine what it would be like, what I would be...
2 tags
pop
the broken hearts of all my best friends make me want to write poetry like pop music and all of their addictions, how much I love to fix them the mother of all bombs, exploding in the distance there are all these points in the page where I stopped paused on a letter, made it pool full of ink like when I’m drunk and all the blood pools in the tips of my fingers the pounding pulse of...
3 tags
Untitled
“So you’ve met before?”
A little drop of sweat forms at the midpoint of my forehead and runs down the bridge of my nose.
We’ve met before.
Her name is Katerina, but everyone calls her Kate. I haven’t seen in her four years since she almost killed me.
*
There are certain things I might still remember about her if you were to ask me years from now. Like how she never looked tired. Where the...
2 tags
Promise
Dimly I might remember your face, in the flickering light of someone else’s fireplace. I will remember how I wanted to be wearing a blue coat when I met you, but instead I was wearing green and that is not how it was supposed to happen. I might feel something important when I hear your name, something that could travel through my bloodsteam until I die, but most likely I will feel nothing. I...
it was not
so he made good on his promises (eventually). all the blood had gone from my body already, so i had to give something else.
it was love after all.
[© 2010 Sophia Nelson]
3 tags
The Story in Five Parts (From End to Beginning)
(Zero She has let forgetting define her. She has let scars achromatize. She has let her lungs empty, and her hair grow, and her eyes shrink. She is longing for a home.)
One It is colder now, so in the nighttime when she exhales her breath is a ghost in the air. There is snow everywhere. Some moments when there is nobody to watch she lays down in it and feels like a she is painting colors on the...
5 tags
* Measure a thousand times and cut once. The mantra of a person who is certain of their task. * I don’t remember where I was the first time I did it, not the color of the room or the décor. I don’t remember the time of day or whether there was music or silence. What I do remember is the feeling – the awkward placement of my thumb and forefinger backwards over the handle of the scissors and how...
3 tags
How do you prepare for the death of a parent?
How do you dream of a wedding without your mom?
How do you imagine having children that will never know their grandmother?
How do you scramble to be happy so she when she goes she knows you’ll be okay?
How do you reconcile the urgent want for her suffering to end with the desperate need for her not to go?
How do I wait for this?
3 tags
Good Luck
I was making the wrong decision last week, watching myself actively trotting down the last leg of a path that I should have never taken.
There’s a margin of error for the perfect places I am transported to on my own breathing. But I have rotten luck. The way I let things escalate, it’s the habit that keep my phobias growing all around me, like a garden, like a menagerie.
And as I was...
4 tags
How Things Were When 2006 Became 2007
there was the gray cat curled into a perfect circle nicks on her knuckles from the fight with the fox in the backyard and one on my baby toe from tripping up the stairs in your apartment lobby a ball of silver tinfoil on the coffee table from all the kisses neatly sculpted like a crystal ball i could...
2 tags
In a House, With a Mouse
I dreamed I knew a mouse last night, who was a person really. I spent most of the dream making her little houses to be in and finding her in unexpected places.
Once she turned back into her human self she told me that she would be attending some university in California and wanted me to come along.
I told her I couldn’t because I was going to Barcelona.
She was really something special.
Take the pills Because they’re right in front of you Because they’re telling you the truth Like water lost in the sea A secret lost inside you Who?
[© 2010 Sophia Nelson]
3 tags
Reconcile
I did choose, didn’t I? And I chose love. Lonely lonely in the moon. Thought you’d ask me not to leave. Thought I’d always want to stay. Lonely lonely the island cries, so that the mouth can barely speak. Lonely lonely that was you, clapping in the distance, applause. Crept in like a shadow underneath the door-frame. You’re the one in the sky, in the dark, in the night. Lonely lonely rests the...
good bye
good bye.
i live in the real world, because i have to. i don’t get to make any choices that matter except the ones that keep me from sitting still, so god can’t reach out and grab me. although i’d rather it be me than you. i’d rather he pick me up, spread open my ribs, give my heart to you, bring me back up in his fingers like a doll. place me frozen in a glacier, he’d promised me that you...
November 2009
1 post
So I let go the ratio of things said to things heard.
[© 2010 Sophia Nelson]