Nicole Rollender
Light Work
Mother doesn’t eat meat on Fridays
and prods me to pray to the saint of the day.
Sweet Fiacre shelters souls who shiver in tubs
from syphilis and bone collapse, while Gertrude
kisses the cheeks of men who fear mice,
fingers tapping out humble songs
on window panes. You can learn
to unstitch people who eat
secrets. Lean in. Snuffing yourself
out is wrong, mother says, but Apollonia –
who cast her chaste body into flame, a holy
escape from rape after a man hammered
out her teeth – entered the canon, her necklace
of gold bicuspids pulls souls closer. God, once
I believed in prayer bone’s steady gnaws
and groans, the way a collection of virgins
jumped into the sea, drowning before rape
(the body is failing out) to open luminous eyes
into paradise. The work of light
is God’s burden: light workers
alight on lit bone, now getting lost
in the trees except for bone-light
guiding bitten skin wounded wings
light in cups the saints go searching
lit torches, fireflies buckets of stars
night songs, bones’ light, my skull eats
fire light, at last. Mother, I’m hiding.
I don’t come home.
Nicole Rollender is the author of the poetry chapbooks Absence of Stars (forthcoming, dancing girl press & studio), Little Deaths (forthcoming, ELJ Publications) and Arrangement of Desire. She’s the recipient of CALYX Journal’s 2014 Lois Cranston Memorial Prize, the 2012 Princemere JournalPoetry Prize, and Ruminate Magazine’s 2012 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize for her Pushcart Prize-nominated poem “Necessary Work,” chosen by Li-Young Lee. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Alaska Quarterly Review, Creative Nonfiction, MiPOesias, Radar Poetry and THRUSH Poetry Journal, among others. She received her MFA from The Pennsylvania State University, and serves as media director for Minerva Rising Literary Journal and editor of Stitches Magazine. Visit her online at www.nicolerollender.com
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