Spring 2022, Volume 32

Poetry by Nicelle Davis

Ronald Koertge's Plant Questions:

1. When you travel do you miss your plants more than you miss people?

I pay for a plant-sitter to water. My instructions two pages, 12-point font. I have no say what happens in my sheets when I leave them. Taking her camera into the bedroom—the images are shadows with features. Her Canon always in control, she measures temperature—documenting decreases in attraction. Bodies deflating like gray balloons. How many things are never seen because of photography? My plants have their own Instagram account. She shows me in her viewfinder a years’ worth of straddling his waist. It is nearly over—I can see it in the arch of her back—but what is it? Something like a joined spirit—something like dissipation.

2. When a plant dies, have you considered a real funeral complete with speeches and a buffet?

When a kid breaks another kid’s ribs you can hear it from the distance of you’re always too late, you stupid bitch. When a Philodendron stem breaks, scent of a jungle covers my desert. It’s all wrong; I can smell that. You, stupid bitch. If you’ve never heard the snap, hear it now with words: nothing will ever be ok. The day after a code red, return is expected with amnesia. Only 9th grade blood marks the floors. Janitors are smoking in the bathroom. I find a tooth outside the lunchroom. I bring plants for students to name: RonRon, Aaron, Tyron. They check and double check that I water them—that they don’t die this year. There are days I teach with the tooth in my palm—hand, mouth of a bitch—knocking on each desk that isn’t paying attention.

3. Are the plants that some consider beautiful high maintenance?...

The women who raised me, taught maintenance as proof of beauty. Etymology of the word vagina links to vanilla as in sheath to the sword. I draw the flower on my wipe board—soft white petals with pink edges and an exaggerated stamen. Kids giggle and I ask what’s so funny. Suddenly they don’t get the punch line: Penis Purse. All of my son’s westside PTA moms have matching Coach Bags. It’s the most successful raffle prize at the Fall Festival. If your man doesn’t deliver, chance might. Even on brand, it will be seen as imitation. No win really, a hand-me-down at best. In my eastside class one girl responds without thinking, that’s so fucked up.     

        …If so, what kind of special treatment do you provide?

Mother’s challenge for me growing up: get into clubs, underage and free. Do not confuse free for freedom. At Christian girls’ camp, we were taught to fire bake cobbler and give massages. Learning seduction is done slant—the confusion of practicing touch on other girls, never addressed. My best friend’s eyes bluer than any boy’s. Mantra: It’s as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor one.  As if repetition were magic: forget, forget, forget the color blue. Let us pray: it’s easy. Using hydroponics to keep my expensive plants always wet, they grow better with age. I’ve learned to take care of myself, but it's lonely watching proof fade.

4. Do the grow lights in your house remind you of the warmth from your circle of friends?...

The word Fiend came before friend. Is History a teacher or a politician? This question makes me wish I wasn’t a poet. The original R was designed to look like a head and neck—basically, the brain and face of the alphabet. I think of you. I see you. I love you, you fucking back stabbing cunt. Until light shines on it, does anything exist? They say if you haven’t used it in a year throw it away. Part of the appeal of plant collecting is that it’s a forgivable act of hoarding. I remember the R of every plant dealer I ever did business with, good or bad, only without the or.

        …Or are your best friends now your plants?

Plants are not fiends so they can’t be friends. Nothing that is kept can love its keeper. There is nothing here, other than what will remain of the world once humanity has choked on its humanness. R you there fiend? I will always love you. Think how our bullshit will fertilize all we sought to control. Take my R, it’s yours.

 

Ars/Ours as Destination

She never goes anywhere without another place to be. You never know when a room will fill up with words, she says.  What is in and out of the world these days? I know we just 
 
started this trip, but can we please make a pit-stop? Listen to the similarities in Ars and Ours. She and I. Was there 
a difference? These days public restrooms can kill. I guess not 
 
much has changed. An urgency to pee when really, I’m caught in
a phantom orgasm. What was it we wanted? Most money 
I ever made as a poet was as a .com party favor. I’d dress in fish-
 
nets and a strap-on Olympia typewriter. Guests would line-up 
for poems to give the person they didn’t invite to the party—
a wish you were here backhand written by someone else. Make 
 
me poetry with stars, kittens, and that night in Cavo, they’d say.  
I’ve never been to Cavo. Drowning in the dryness of cotton-mouth. Make the poem sound like expectation, be master 
 
of convenience, and they’ll tip big. I lost that job after writing 
a poem in the voice of a boy’s circumcision. In truth I lost
that job because the mother of the Bar-mitzvah-boy was expecting 
 
a male version—who is Jewish, charming, and could be mistaken 
for straight if need-be. Need-be is a funny word. Such a useless 
way to say useful.  At forty, I obsess over prepositions, when I know

I should be working on my verbs. I’m far from these stanzas— I mean moments. It’s quarantine and I’m convinced I will never be touched again. I am trying to get us to the ocean, but I’m afraid to 
 
say what’s waiting for us there. Reader, if you’re there, I have to write us to the sea. Stay with me. At this memory, we are at a reading—the kind where patron’s checks are signed. I once went to

dinner where the host had me hold an original Picasso while five academics performed their foreignness. I was such a nervous wall.
It intrigues me how much of the self can be sold.  
 
She is at the salon wearing a necklace of vintage keys, letters
that spell out her name. She touches herself as if smoothing out
how much she thinks people hate her outfit. Teeth are out like 
 
Chandeliers tonight. No one is thinking about you, she tells me. 
Who’s to know if we mean to harm or hurt each other? The poet says, the curse of the poet is knowing there are no such things as synonyms.

The curse of the poet is to be always referencing the poet. I am beginning to wonder if the poet even exists.  Honestly, I like Big-
foot better. I have traveled miles to show my son replicas of

Sasquatch scat. We drove for stories and verses so much that they fold like a roadmap in his head. He loves his smart phone more
than the arteries of LA. The reading, I’m remembering, is long yet

near the sea.  I am with my publisher, who holds my son like
an editor. We called it love for a season. She’d have us arrive late
and leave early. The sound of waves our eyes. We said nothing but

felt wet. She loved (or is it loves) to swim more than listen. I couldn’t be an ocean. There’re no synonyms for words I don’t have. This poem will never act like a poem. Now out all this in one line: 

I mouth a handful of water, taste salt, and spit us back into the sea. 

 

 

 

BIO: Nicelle Davis is a California poet, collaborator, and performance artist who walks the desert with her son J.J. in search of owl pellets and rattlesnake skins. Her poetry collections include The Walled Wife (Red Hen Press, 2016), In the Circus of You (Rose Metal Press, 2015), Becoming Judas (Red Hen Press, 2013), and Circe (Lowbrow Press, 2011). Her poetry film collaborations with Cheryl Gross have been shown across the world. She has taught poetry at Youth for Positive Change, an organization that promotes success for youth in secondary schools, MHA, Volunteers of America in their Homeless Youth Center, and with Red Hen’s WITS program. She is the creator of The Poetry Circus and collaborator on the Nevermore Poetry Festival. She currently teaches at Knight High School. ​