Dead Girl Dancing E-Book

Mike L. Nichols

• Herausgeber: tredition
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 31

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

"Dead Girl Dancing" is a widely accessible treatise on grief and loss. The poems in this debut collection, sprinkled with slant rhyme and sound, provide catharsis for those who've experienced death and loss.

Leseprobe

Dead Girl Dancing

Mike L. Nichols

Copyright © 2021 Mike L. Nichols

Publisher: tredition GmbH, Halenreie 40-44, 22359 Hamburg,

Germany

ISBN

Paperback:

978-3-347-18172-4

Hardcover:

978-3-347-18173-1

eBook:

978-3-347-18174-8

Printed on demand in many countries

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.

Dead Girl Dancing

for the living, because grief does not die

Contents

I

Tradition

Yellow Means Be Ready to Stop

Grave Children

Between Deaths

Would it Be Okay

Numbers Game - 1984

Dead Girl Dancing

Pull the Covers to Your Chin

Sesame Street

A Brief Ceremony

Unfinished

Now

My Mother is a Skeleton pt I

I’ve Misplaced My Basket

Escort Service

Keep It Holy

American Way

Never is Longer

She Looks So Peaceful, Like She’s Only Sleeping

II

Flap Method

Let There Be Light

Shroud

Go with the Flow

Magic Number

Proximate C.O. D.

Perspective

Spilling

Hide and Seek is Not Fun for Me

I Decide to Attend the Services

My Mother is a Skeleton pt II

2 a.m.

Night Terrors

I’m Still Not Tall Enough to Reach

Full Circle

There’s Nothing On TV at 5 pm

What Does Rage Consume for Fuel

This House is Cold

Neolithic Period

Tradition

The line of loved ones

leads to a satin

bedded corpse.

A gauntlet of

consideration & kindness

wherein those forming rank

suffer the blows.

Yellow Means Be Ready To Stop

I should feel uneasy

in this ever-darkening bedroom

on the evening of your funeral

gazing in your dresser mirror

watching you push up your tiny

coffin lid and smooth down your

yellow dress while turning

your unsmiling eyes

to mine.

You were bleeding so much

but no one would pay attention to me

and help us. Children are always crying

wolf. Pale and unconcerned, you picked at

the lace on your yellow dress. We were

too little to understand how important,

like gravity, you were to me.

I dream you,

playing in our sandbox.

Clouds drift in, darken the yard.

The wind moans, whirs the weeping

willow leaves and pushes

at your yellow dress.

It blows you away

grain by grain.

Leaves behind your

perfect impression

in sand and cat shit.

Grave Children

See the child grown. Lonely,

in a pasture empty. He wavers.

He wears his snowman sweater,

not warm, itchy. He knows the cold

is gnawing past his edges but he doesn’t feel

that. The anger sometimes ambushes him

while he stands shivering to breathe lilacs

on the almost summer lawn where she is

buried – untouchable – fifty feet below.

He knows what the cold does. Shrunken scrotum,

sticking eyelashes, nose froze in snot-sicles.

He should go. Nothing here to hold but memory.

And on January’s squeaking snow

memory’s mouth ch-ch-chatters, shatters teeth.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

They told him, “She has gone. Don’t worry.”

Lethal, like Martin Riggs you’ll see her again.

Later – much later. For now stand and suffer

the little children to come unto you.

Their memories like road-squirrel’s bellies

squashed by fatly pulsing vacancies,

Cracking bone Oozing marrow.

When you forget, the absence blind-sides you.

Better to remember then, and smile, silly.

Tamp down your erupting rage.

Swallow that curdled milk of malice.

Her aspect now an emptiness. Death is distance

and a nice shearing will strip away scratchy sweaters,

exposing the poorly mended wounds of these

witnesses, of lambs led to slaughter.