Ways of Blessing
Holy nomenclature of firetipped butterflies shining holy my wet
orchard of abandoned belongings let me feed the needy with fruit at least
unlatch my tongue & feed it to a child afraid to name the world
the heart doesn’t run the body any time the ghost
can unknot from its mooring eternity & grief both look like water
bless blue-cold midnight when we light lanterns
from this hearth’s fire when God’s deathless face compasses
us from darkness to never-failing flame when I was a girl, I ate meals
separate from my parents so they could talk holy that loneliness
that hasn’t left me holy fence broken through where we see sheep’s
breath the color of rotting blossoms we choose to bless
or curse to call goodness or evil our worst suffering
is no more serious than one night in an unlighted motel a bat’s
leg bones are so thin it cannot walk
it seems unfair too, the mother who doesn’t know to finger
the sign of the cross on her sleeping child not entering
paradise by the precision of just one hair’s breakage but you can’t
kneel in your future beside the fence
you’ll build post holes filling with rain the holes I left
in my mother’s bones & the glow in her marrow bless
beeswax candles at the moment of sacrifice bless this bed’s wood
this down shall we have many children here (the gate
to heaven where my husband cups my shoulders) where my body
houses another body so I have two names I’m glad for late-daylight
rusting my skin that I can still touch someone else open my body
to a girl child unmoor her sleep body holy
her fistfuls of wings holy her life after mine
My Words Stuck in My Daughter’s Throat
She opens her mouth & I expect a bird’s litany
to dislodge. Her bone instrument
for what is and is not
the truth: we can’t unsee the dead, we can reattach hissing wing
bones to our useless scapulas. She asks who takes time from us—I watch
petals bloom from her mouth into
a perpetual bone-sawing song—with this, she pulls my soul so
through my body, red thread through the needle’s eye. I’ve wondered
if I can live without longing now, for all I haven’t done & may
never: let her sleep curled with a spotted rabbit
we didn’t bring home from the fair, let her sleep spine to my
spine in deepest winter. When her head crowned,
I reached to pull her out, heart erratic as lightning. I called
her my grace, meaning I thought I was barren & yet
I grew a small cathedral, cornerstone her first loose tooth
capped with blood. They used to believe
the uterus galloped through the body, red-sweating. Wherever
it braced, the woman clutched her pain. Lord,
what a fire at the skull’s base as we learn
to mother. Mothering’s undying noose, meaning the first time
I saw her face tinged with ice & blueberries, eyes sewn shut,
it was like the first time I saw the world—my daughter
crossing my borders naked, nothing in her tiny hands. Yet
her fleshy breath still inside me—an echo, disappearing ink,
a snowflake growing smaller as it’s cut out & out
from parchment. & my words stuck in her throat—I confess,
one day I hope she speaks the language I’m still learning,
to hold so tenderly a body made from yours, to also
let your shadow-girl walk free down the road, out of sight.
Nicole Rollender is the author of Louder Than Everything You Love (Five Oaks, 2017), and the poetry chapbooks Arrangement of Desire (Pudding House Publications), Absence of Stars (dancing girl press & studio), Ghost Tongue (Porkbelly Press), and Bone of My Bone, a winning manuscript in Blood Pudding Press’s 2015 Chapbook Contest. Her work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New Poets, The Journal, Memorious, Radar Poetry, PANK, Salt Hill Journal, Thrush Poetry Journal, Word Riot and West Branch, among others. She’s the recipient of a poetry fellowship from the New Jersey Council on the Arts, and poetry prizes from CALYX Journal, Princemere Journal and Ruminate Magazine. She earned her MFA in poetry at the Pennsylvania State University. She’s the editor-in-chief of Wearables and executive director of branded content & professional development at the Advertising Specialty Institute. In 2016, she was named one of FOLIO’s Top Women in Media. Visit her online at www.nicolerollender.com