How to Stop Drowning
First, breathe on the mirror—if you had drowned,
you wouldn’t see your wet face (but you keep trying to write poems),
the light pooling in your cheeks the way it does
in sand pockets next to the ocean, their topography
always altering. Because you’re not the same girl as Easters ago
when your mother plaited your hair, when she pinned lace embroideries
in dolor’s colors on her hair. Confide in me. Where does this drowning
come from? Or the honeyed poem that springs from a parakeet
bathing in your father’s hands. A man can be gentle, so you still
look for a way to pronounce love in its abandoned egg. But one day,
if another man holds you down, confine me, if your mother opens
her mouth in a dream, saying, down my throat is the River Styx,
you could pay off the boat woman to skiff you out of the world:
and your dirt-filled skull would open its extra eye to what is
in the living’s orbit, under the side yard where the man held you down,
where he unloosened his belt, where he pressed the side of your light-
pooling face, to the grass that smelled like sorrow. The body
is reducible to many things—how, here, your sacrum cracks for the first time.
Later, it will fissure more when you birth your first child. And how the windows
open above your head when this man pushes into your chest,
the darkening-canopy-sky a coda to what happens outside the neighbor’s house.
Except you kick him hard, your ribs wallop up into his, as he says, you want this,
your pelvis rocks back into his bone. The body is reducible to tendon. Or snarl.
Or want. Or you, making an angel and spreading snow. To remove
the body covering yours as a shadow. So when you feel your throat
filling with water, you can swallow it—the wounds sutured, the sutra
stuttering germination, where flowers grow in shadow, the archangel’s
petals turn up to catch twilight, that last remaining edge of day
where you have crawled into, O, bedface, so defaced, effaced.
by Nicole Rollender
you wouldn’t see your wet face (but you keep trying to write poems),
the light pooling in your cheeks the way it does
in sand pockets next to the ocean, their topography
always altering. Because you’re not the same girl as Easters ago
when your mother plaited your hair, when she pinned lace embroideries
in dolor’s colors on her hair. Confide in me. Where does this drowning
come from? Or the honeyed poem that springs from a parakeet
bathing in your father’s hands. A man can be gentle, so you still
look for a way to pronounce love in its abandoned egg. But one day,
if another man holds you down, confine me, if your mother opens
her mouth in a dream, saying, down my throat is the River Styx,
you could pay off the boat woman to skiff you out of the world:
and your dirt-filled skull would open its extra eye to what is
in the living’s orbit, under the side yard where the man held you down,
where he unloosened his belt, where he pressed the side of your light-
pooling face, to the grass that smelled like sorrow. The body
is reducible to many things—how, here, your sacrum cracks for the first time.
Later, it will fissure more when you birth your first child. And how the windows
open above your head when this man pushes into your chest,
the darkening-canopy-sky a coda to what happens outside the neighbor’s house.
Except you kick him hard, your ribs wallop up into his, as he says, you want this,
your pelvis rocks back into his bone. The body is reducible to tendon. Or snarl.
Or want. Or you, making an angel and spreading snow. To remove
the body covering yours as a shadow. So when you feel your throat
filling with water, you can swallow it—the wounds sutured, the sutra
stuttering germination, where flowers grow in shadow, the archangel’s
petals turn up to catch twilight, that last remaining edge of day
where you have crawled into, O, bedface, so defaced, effaced.
by Nicole Rollender
Nicole Rollender’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New Poets, The Journal, Memorious, THRUSH Poetry Journal, West Branch, Word Riot and others. Her first full-length collection, Louder Than Everything You Love, in which "How to Stop Drowning" appears, was published by ELJ Publications in 2015. She’s the author of the poetry chapbooks Arrangement of Desire (Pudding House Publications, 2007), Absence of Stars (dancing girl press & studio, 2015), Bone of My Bone, a winner in Blood Pudding Press’s 2015 Chapbook Contest, and Ghost Tongue (Porkbelly Press, 2016). She has received poetry prizes from CALYX Journal, Ruminate Magazine and Princemere Journal. www.nicolerollender.com