Nickole Brown is the author of two collections of poetry, Fanny Says (BOA Editions, 2015); and Sister, a novel-in-poems (Red Hen Press, 2007); and the anthology, Air Fare (Sarabande Books, 2004), which she co-edited with Judith Taylor. She graduated from The Vermont College of Fine Arts and was the editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson. She has received grants […]
We have heard her tell the story over and again, like this: an early spring tornado, a still, yellow sky, nuns who said must have felt better going in than it does coming out as they gave her a hot compress and dimmed the lights for pain. She was half my age now, barely healed […]
That year was the cyanide hiding in the stone of a peach. Look, how yellow the photographs, a nicotine sheen on our happy days, a disease roiling out of the Congo to lay flat my first fathers before I learned to spell their names. Eric, for example, Erique, with that surprise ending to match his […]
Few memories, those years besides the smell of dead kittens under the car and the cucumber of copperheads crisping the creek where I waded with a net from our above-ground pool to scoop up black tadpoles and crawdads, the adrenaline flash of minnows silvering an orange bucket. Few memories of you, nothing to say about […]
Of course I always did spell it wrong. Cause there’s no way to speak and spell things right, especially after all those years washing with a wursh rag, frying in earl, stuffing my drawers in a shiffarobe, settling down into a pilot on the floor. And it’s true, I got up in front of a […]
plant it in the folds of your intestines where it is warm and dark and swimming in shit. keep it there in the churning wormed organs, hold it still, claim it your own. say this is mine—my garbage, my rot, my rage, and i will not just lay it down. rock it in your arms […]
Pretend I know you. Pretend in a deep pool I always find you first following the familiar Marco-Polo of your voice. Pretend we’ve played freeze-tag wrapped in the sticky transparency of spring, new grass greening our shoes and knees. Pretend we’ve played hopscotch, made it to heaven so many times we wore the chalk to […]
Nickole Brown talks about, and reads, one of her favorite poems, Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s “Song.”