Everything Never Comes Your Way

Nicole Stellon O' Donnell

• Publisher: Boreal Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781597099431
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Poesie

In her third collection, Nicole Stellon O'Donnell explores the landscapes of memory, argument, and wilderness. These poems deconstruct memoir, dig at the roots of philosophical argumentation, and critique the role of the poet as an observer of the natural world. From manicured baseball fields to the debate podium, from the lobby of the public pool to the hallowed Alaskan cabin where John Haines once sat down to write, these poems push against the notion that the solitary self is the arbiter of truth.

1

Leave Out the Hours

Memoir

Leave in bad breath, adult acne, ulcerative colitis. Leave out the hours you spend on the couch watching just one more episode. Confess to the affair and the drugs, but don’t mention the murder. Never mention the murder, even though you think a court would call it manslaughter. Confess you cheated in school, but leave out the cancer scare in your midthirties that left you weeping in the rocking chair as you nursed your five-month-old to sleep. Everyone has that kind of story. Consider writing about the cancer that baby would get when she was eight. No, save that for its own book later on. But don’t wait too long. Once she’s a teenager, she won’t want you writing about her cancer. Leave out tasting moose heart for the first time and spitting it on your plate. Leave in the inflated ptarmigan stomach. Leave out the fireflies, or leave them in. Leave out the ripped underpants, the banana peels, your mother lighting cigarettes on the stove. Wait, leave that in, but leave out the after-school cookies. Leave in the wine. Leave in the crash, the glass in your chin. Leave in that time you got caught deliberately losing at strip poker in middle school. That’s the good kind of shame. Every reader wants a little cringe without much terror. Leave out college. Nobody wants to read that these days.

Emptiness

I know you are here, but nowhere I see. The Zen master calls us upstairs one by one to his chamber for our interviews. No you on the stairs. My head, a tangle of bother about the woman on the zafu across from me who shifts every ten minutes. Chair to cushion, cushion to chair. Is that allowed? Every forty minutes we circle the cushions. Is it not enough? Why do I care? Legs asleep, knee aching, I think who are these people I am not-talking with? People I meet and not-meet. Then I catch myself and label the thought thinking. I slept on the floor near the deck door, or not-slept, with all the bumbling to the bathroom in the middle of the night. The hallway light off, then on, then off again. The whole night I waited for nothing to show up. Nothing ever did.

At St. Joseph of Cluny Higher Secondary School, Puducherry, India

Because the teacher is reading aloud, because the morning is warm and the ceiling fans whisper a backbeat to her voice, because I sit among the children on the hard wood benches, because the room is a blue like a faded noon sky, because the words are soft in her throat and softer in my ears, I forget the seventy students who called out Good Morning, ma’am and God Bless You in welcome. I forget the chair scratch on concrete, the sweat, the shifting to give the guest a seat directly underneath the ceiling fan. I forget the notes I’m supposed to take about how she is teaching the poem. Only her voice, her pink-flowered sari, her posture, her the-teacher-is-reading-to-you lilt. Only the room full of fifth standard girls in plaid uniforms, all listening. Only the listening. Listening so strong that I shrink to my fourth-grade self, and when she asks, Are we ready for the next stanza, children, I almost say Yes, ma’am.

By Proxy

I don’t know how you’re doing this.

—the well-meaning people who don’t know what to say

There is no not doing this.

My child is that child. Another bald child.

No eyelashes. No eyebrows.

We all know what that means.

You know. I know.

It means the worst thing

a parent can imagine.

Look at the pictures online:

One kid trails an IV.

Another sits in a bed

visiting with a football player.

A close-up: a small hand

crowned with a hospital bracelet

holds an adult’s hand.

I would have volunteered, held

the pain in my body,

like I held her in my body

before she was born.

Pain might have squirmed

and turned, like she did

at eight months, making me

scared she’d be breech.

I have room for more scars. Please.

A diagonal slash

across my abdomen, a numb

triangle beneath the white line.

I have space. Give me

a port scar, a bubble

under my collarbone.

The lung biopsy scar,

a chip beneath

my shoulder blade.

If the only way out is through,

then pull me all the way through,

like a needle.

Let what little

I am allowed to offer

be a thread,

stitching this cut

through our lives

back together.

And you, dear one. You only say you

don’t know how I am doing this

because you believe your relief

over not being me will protect you

from being me someday.

And me, I have imagined worse things.

I can’t stop imagining worse things.

That’s how I’m doing this.

Mothering Martha and Mary

Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself?

—Luke 10:38–42

Daughters are like that, bickering.

One has done something. The other did it first.

One steals the other’s pants and swings them

over her head. The other screeches.

One demolishes the bedroom

while the other weeps in the top bunk.

The tears have something to do with Silly Putty.

One makes faces naked in the bathroom mirror

to prevent the other from brushing her teeth.

One punches the other in the face

while she is sitting on the toilet. Crying,

they tattle. Shouting, they tattle.

Jesus Christ, I say, knock it off.

Jesus Christ, I say,

you were wrong.

I s...