Need Me
Nicolle Miller
You used to beat me until you bled
Remember the time you made me cry
for that happy audience with tipping drinks
Lucid blue smoke floated like water
You grabbed a wave and
twisted it around my neck-
If only I could have smiled
Even after you broke me, you picked me
up off the floor, and put me back together
You were my love, my luthier
You sang to me while you worked
Your voice fell like warm oil
and dripped onto your mirror shoes
You picked at me until the stars died
You played me during that orange summer
You held me and you shook me
But you loved me, remember
You loved me because I wanted you
to love the way I walked
So when you said that-
said that you had to-
had to put me down for awhile
I was broken worse than before
A different kind of pain that stung more, more
than the time you left me in the searing rain
You sold me.
I slept for days, I remember
dreaming of pulses and your heart
beat, I waited for you to come
around and control me so sweetly
But as I was sleeping
in this cave of velvet ink
Someone else picked me
up and unfolded me
He makes me sing and cry
just like you used to do
City Suppression
Nicolle Miller
I remember rows of pines and the way their boughs made a tunnel for me
I remember running barefoot through the wet grass outside my home
Sitting on my knees, picking wild raspberries, and popping them in my mouth.
I remember searching for secrets through green rows of skyscraper corn
I remember finding caterpillars - millions of them
Their legs hugged yellow swaying stalks of grass behind my lonely tree.
I forgot the wind’s cry in the night
Snaking around the knife-edge of the complex
I forgot the haunting scratch of working computers.
I forgot the freezing water creeping closer after the flood
Making me shiver and pull thin blankets closer.
I forgot the clocks angry click, glaring at me with impatient faces.
Sleeping Pills
Nicolle Miller
Water wrinkles, laughing at sand,
Its music, can’t you understand?
I need the melody to climb into my brain,
Make it stop; I just want it to be
at peace like the wrinkles and grains.
The sun dies beside the fat Earth,
The moon gives birth to stars,
I swallow you one by one.
The lazy river takes me away to
ocean swells, up and down,
in and out; this ship is sailing.
An old moth lands, right on my hand,
Its music, can’t you understand?
The Hunter
Nicolle Miller
There is a bear on the trolley.
There are other people like myself
on this trolley, but we are singular stumps
Alone together.
The bear rises on two pissed paws and roars
Weather clings to his fur like lice.
The stumps glance, but quickly
Shift their wooden eyes to a side.
The trolley stops, ending its dizzy flight for a blink.
A giant lumbers into the trolley cave
strides up to the angry bear and both
begin growling, rumbling
thunder inside and out their trolley cave.
Stumps don’t shift their frozen eyes now.
The trolley slams to a stop.
A doe runs off the trolley
Her twig legs and tiny hooves
slide on the wet steps.
It’s not my stop, so I just wait.
The trolley soars until the next stop.
Something else climbs up
the steps of our cave speed away
It walks on two up to the fight.
There is a hunter on the trolley.
He stares into their black hole eyes
One, two, three, four-
He shot them dead.
Our flying cave screeches to a final halt.
All the stumps roll out of the trolley cave.
I focus on the tiny red rivers on the floor
I swim through the little rows of plastic
Mud, blood
Rain, fur.