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Elizabeth Nicell

 

at fifteen I was swallowed and regurgitated

as a freshly baked batch of words I didn’t

know were allowed to sit

together

 

thought that they lived as hostile neighbors

in separate homes of anatomy,

that women smoked cigarettes in the

shell of my skull and gossiped men-crushes

 

and men-holding, and men pressed lips to

the swell of my ventricles all alone,

squeezed love in the hollow of stingy fists

but

 

insatiable woman 

women-loving woman  

men-loving woman 

people-loving woman

 

I stuffed them back in the oven, quarantined

the women and their cigarettes back in my

brain in case they were contagious, in case

their infection of my heart could be chronic

 

At seventeen, a blink shattered the stove

and burnt me up inside, melted me, exposed

my bones and veins and blood that made up

the borough of the men kissing women, the women

kissing wom-  

 

Bury me at the feet of those I love and

those that will never know it because saying it

constructs that village out here on the pavement,

and I still have those oven shards in my neck and

 

Hold me beneath the earth with your

grave dirt fingernails, dig in

my women-holding arms please

don’t let me apologize, don’t take my

 

sorries from my men-kissing lips,

from my women-kissing lips,

sew up your pockets and

don’t dig me up unless I tell you I don’t

 

love women, scream just-men-loving

from the lipstick tube casket you’ve

stuffed me into, don’t let me out

as dust fills my mouth, I’ll tell you how

 

on my first date with a man, he spit his gum

on the floor of a movie theater and when

around his women-loving men he would build

me one of those interrogation windows, where

 

I could see him rolling those crude jokes in his

mouth, molding gay in a people-hating way,

those shoes are gay that class was gay you’re gay 

that’s gay that’s gay – all he saw was a mirror

 

his own pearly teeth looked upon pearly laughs

at his pearly jokes, and I punched and bit and

ate at the glass, but this booth was made for

criminals, the kind that you ask hard questions

 

to and expect confessions with a pearly tooth smile

generations were born while I forgot that words fell out

of an oven, while I gossiped men-crushes and men-holding

with a friend my chest squeezed for when we sat a little too close

 

he told me I was funny in the way that women

aren’t, while he smoked weed and drank fireball at

sixteen, I stared at women in the lunch line and

talked to God about the Rules

 

He followed I love you with can we fuck now?

And I kicked at the oven corpse, said no I am

waiting, waiting I’m a good girl I kneel

in pews when the Father asks I confess

 

when the Father asks I clasp my hands and say

Our Father Hail Mary Full of Grace Our Father  

Our Father Our Father Forgive Us Our Trespasses 

Deliver us from evil Deliver me from evil 

I’m waiting, see I’m waiting 

 

He did not need to know that the waiting

was for someone softer.

 

 


Elizabeth Nicell is from Glassboro, New Jersey. She is in the Class of 2024 and is majoring in English.

Her poems were drafted in Fall 2021 Semester’s Creative Writing: Poetry.