Nicholas Yingling
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nyingling.bsky.social
Nicholas Yingling
@nyingling.bsky.social
470 followers 600 following 66 posts
Poet. Author of THE FIRE ROAD (Barrow Street 2024): https://barrowstreet.org/press/product/the-fire-road-nicholas-yingling/
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nyingling.bsky.social
"When I say land
sometimes I mean belief. When I say ocean

I mean all the rest

unarticulated with the mouth's
profane shape"
-Amanda Hawkins from WHEN I SAY THE BONES I MEAN THE BONES @wapress.bsky.social
Cover of WHEN I SAY THE BONES I MEAN THE BONES by Amanda Hawkins Bears Ears National Monument and Other Diminishing Lands What gods do we grope in common-what land sprawls to the west- what oceans will swallow our solid continents? I wanted the remnants, the salvageable bones kept clean and away from light. The paintings-one might stand too close the breath to carry the unseen, water droplets decay what would be preserved. Kept, I thought, was the operative word suspended-the holy space set aside. Who says such preservation is in contention with logic- land lies bare, flat, folded, stacked, and ripped along a seam. The bones of the dead are everywhere believed to be sacred. The land exposed, but most hidden by oceans rising, by the land being by nature a surface. When I say land sometimes I mean belief. When I say ocean I mean all the rest unarticulated with the mouth's profane shape. I mean to say how the body moves is praxis, the paintings on the stone were roped off to keep pilgrims from touching-to preserve what could be lost. But when I say the bones I mean the bones.
April 24, 2025 at 2:03 PM
nyingling.bsky.social
"I was often told to smile by complete strangers
as if a six-year-old girl in patched bellbottoms
& a Mork & Mindy t-shirt wasn't cheerful enough"
- @majda.bsky.social from IN THE HOUSE OF MODERN UPBRINGING FOR GIRLS @wapress.bsky.social
Cover of IN THE HOUSE OF MODERN UPBRINGING FOR GIRLS by Majda Gama Tala (To the Girl Palm) When I ate the fruit of the date palm delivered fresh to me from an oasis in the empty quarter, admired the gilt-twined bag the fruit lay in, & hesitated to disturb this wonder of Arab irrigation, fruit bat pollination, & desert patience, I knew why fathers send their daughters to the West with kilos of dates: sukkary, khudry, segai, heavily wrapped & suspicious in luggage; the care in the fruit meant to last us in places where trees drop all their leaves & appear dead to the eye. I eyed my gift, portioned myself one to eat on a balcony casting a cool shadow over sand speckled with blood & feathers from a wild falcon kill, knew I could have sent that falcon into the sky to feed, knew that to the East, in the oasis, young girl-palms were sheltering, growing, while men in white bathed & dressed them, named them, then let the desert raise them. Greek Gods, 1978 I was often told to smile by complete strangers as if a six-year-old girl in patched bellbottoms & a Mork & Mindy t-shirt wasn't cheerful enough I had to dwell in their space just while passing them on the sidewalk walking but in my mind gliding in new sneakers that promised hermetic levels of flight I knew Greek mythology could even pronounce the Gods correctly they had names like my heroes on Battlestar Galactica which I watched with my twin & parents in footed pajamas after my father brushed my hair to a stellar shine I'd open my eyes wide to receive the feathered hair & sensational teeth of Starbuck my 1st crush but he didn't like brunettes like me or dark jump-suited Athena who served on the ship's bridge sending space warriors into battle with a girl-next-door attitude & contoured cheeks she lost him over & over again to Cassiopeia of the white-winged disco dresses who was hopelessly blonde like my mother who everyone eyed sideways when she walked by them same for Cassiopeia no one seemed to breathe around her & Starbuck never really had to choose but they fought over him nonetheless while he just threw on his leather jacket & blasted himself into space with a joystick off to fight Cylons in a fleet of jets called Vipers I hated her (I loved my mother) I still don't trust blonde women I had the power to dress myself & dressed for myself with Wonder Woman Underoos underneath as armor for when neighborhood boys thundered by in a gang of big-wheels catcalling & that was all I knew of romance for an age.
April 21, 2025 at 2:05 PM
nyingling.bsky.social
Grateful to @sixthfinch.bsky.social for publishing two of my poems. Check out the whole issue here:

sixthfinch.com/mainspring25...
BODY AS SONG, BODY AS BLOOD COUNT Stress, a virus, a two-mile walk home through wildfire smoke when the busses shut down, someone else’s mortgage smoldering in my marrow, too much lead from the mothball fleet or chromium in the groundwater, until the next administration raises the acceptable limit, a childhood beneath the towers and test sirens of a refinery, a city of employees called to service, a rain like resin eating through car paint, the tomatoes— heirlooms sliced red to the seed—we were advised not to grow, living along the border of a class-action lawsuit: to understand the numbers inside me, the hematologist plots my blood on a graph. She draws a bell curve. At both ends the distribution levels out into pure sound, not the instrument but its toll.
April 17, 2025 at 7:25 PM
nyingling.bsky.social
"We blend bone meal with soil at the base of rosebushes,
tendering roots with the dust of other lives"
- @rholanderpoet.bsky.social from UNCERTAIN ACROBATS
Cover of UNCERTAIN ACROBATS by Rebecca Hart Olander. Three dancers or one dancer in three positions, oriented so their bodies are horizontal. The Cancer Is Back We blend bone meal with soil at the base of rosebushes, tendering roots with the dust of other lives. It is this life I want, we seem to say, with each swath of dead perennials we clear, making way for what we assume will come. But there is nothing to mix into this unspeakable void. The cells are doing their dire multiplying, and we already fed them all our best poison. Can you stand to enter those changing rooms again? The metallic pull across of the striped curtain, the flimsy wraparound of a backwards robe? Couldn't you go on seeking cyber chess domination, tying up pork loins stuffed with apricots and sage, wearing the vest you bought in Santa Fe until the buttons all fall off? No more pinpoint tattoos! Your single lung has only just learned to live alone. Find Alternate Routes is what the digital road sign flashed at me as I drove downtown, as if there is another path through this thicket, as if we are sleeping beauties and can be kissed out of our darkness, as if we can cut away kudzu and it will stop letting down its insidious hair, as if we can uproot bittersweet and it will cease its blood red choking of the lilacs, as if you will be unchanged, robust like you were when I was seven and we crouched together in mirrored pose mimicking the stance of breaking into a run, me in my burnt orange corduroy jumpsuit, hair parted to the side and clasped with a barrette, my blue Keds beside your running sneakers still laced tight from the hometown 5K you raced in your sweaty, sun-worn baseball cap, your skin browned from being in the world, early fall 1979, and every beautiful muscle showed in your legs and your flashing smile, oh, damn this route you are racing now, all those other games gone, your detour paved with brittle prognosis, coasting swells nothing like the adrenaline that used to course through, making you feel every inch a man.
April 11, 2025 at 2:25 PM
nyingling.bsky.social
"No lungs, no heart, no breath-
irresistible now, what might you see?

A bird's dying shudder or

lovers knotted in a plotline of release?
You're an example now

of nothing, a fountain of nowhere-"

-Susan Rich from BLUE ATLAS @redhenpress.bsky.social
Cover of BLUE ATLAS by Susan Rich. Four potted plants ascending stairs. The pots are a deep blue against the turquoise stairs. This Could Happen If you kept walking, you would eventually step outside of yourself. You would leave the bones of your body, the bloodlines to all that you loved. You would be free of breasts, liberated from the eyes of body admirers- to travel this earth like a star lily or skunk flower with the forbearance of golden bees. If you kept walking out of the self you could begin again as seawater, as spindrift. Don't worry, you'd say, you're a virgin non-body, you're a witness to ten thousand new worlds. No lungs, no heart, no breath- irresistible now, what might you see? A bird's dying shudder or lovers knotted in a plotline of release? You're an example now of nothing, a fountain of nowhere-
April 7, 2025 at 2:23 PM
nyingling.bsky.social
"Now we are splayed out like dummies
in the mud, like shot soldiers, like angels telling lies about the stars."
-Joe Wilkins from PASTORAL, 1994 @riverriverbooks.bsky.social
Cover of Joe Wilkins' PASTORAL, 1994. A barbed wire fence at dusk or dawn, everything but the horizon still dark. FABLE Coyotes sleep nose to tail in dank caves. A lonesome mountain lion lids the slats of her eyes. In the wind yucca flowers dune and drift. I know the names of things here, the very rise where my father's bones lie, not so far from my grandfather's, and save a sad handful of stories that's as far as we go. Like a city street that ends in a high fence, and it is unclear what has been fenced in, or out, and even here, in this nameless city, you'll find coyotes snouting and slavering after grease and trash, the odd housecat, and it's their recolonizing racket that wakes the child, who rises, whose small hands tremble against cold window glass, and the child's father, a man whose daily work is to take work away from other men, leads the child back to bed, tucks him in, blesses him, blesses him. PASTORAL, 1992 My little brother & I are walking the irrigation dike. The night moonless, overcast, no farmlights for miles-this is true darkness, the kind you might call ink or river bottom, storm or stone, under the covers, up a cow's ass, closed casket. My brother breathes wetly behind me. Mud sucks at our sneakers. It is straight up & down July 4 midnight. My fingers stink of gunpowder & potato salad. When I close my eyes firecrackers leap & pop, & all I want is more- more spark & trace, whistle & bang- but what I've got is a field flooded all to hell & back, surely now a useless crop of foxtail, & my little brother half-asleep on his feet & when I stop running smack into me. Now we are splayed out like dummies in the mud, like shot soldiers, like angels telling lies about the stars.
April 2, 2025 at 2:36 PM
nyingling.bsky.social
"Give the termites your worry / about affording the rent. They too / are saying, eat / the rich."
- @stevenleyva.bsky.social from THE OPPOSITE OF CRUELTY
The cover of THE OPPOSITE OF CRUELTY by Steven Leyva. Seasonal Depression Give the termites your worry / about affording the rent. They too / are saying, eat / the rich. Two kids up / the block slash a neighbor's tires / while the elderly / couple are away at a wedding. Why / do I even bother to tell / anyone who's listening / that everyone involved was white / except me? Give the newborn / mosquitos their banquet of blood and your worry / about diabetes and rotted teeth. Who can say / what insectivore / is waiting/ to eat the things that eat / your worry. Joy: the long-tongued sloth / or joy: the pitcher / plant. Given the insistence on phoenix your tendons return to / given the moles that arrive / on your neck / year after / year from your grandmother / given the fact / that every elegy fails / to reach its true audience / why do I bother / to slash and slash and slash / white from this page?
March 14, 2025 at 5:40 PM
nyingling.bsky.social
"How he unhooked the curtains and wrapped me, naked, in what light they still held"

- @meganmerchant.bsky.social from HORTENSIA, IN WINTER
Cover of HORTENSIA, IN WINTER by Megan Merchant. SUBJECTS TO CONSIDER FOR BOTH PAINTING & WRITING Film on my teeth after eating a hard-boiled egg. Why anyone would call blood crimson. Chopping wood on a day you can see your breath. The clicking sound that Mahjong tiles make. The speed at which they are placed. A windchime strung with bones. The way winter light feels most earnest in the morning. His chin, as it pressed against my shoulder blade. The muscles of grief that cramp without warning. Why men are allowed to age-the absence of a societal tantrum. The Farmer's Almanac that everyone in town is mumbling about. Radishes in a white bowl. Glue, hardened, on the window that looks like frost. Scratches on old records that are a kind of music. Gray hairs in the sink. How he unhooked the curtains and wrapped me, naked, in what light they still held. PORTRAITURE: NUDE We are taught to yearn for erasure. Red stockings drying over the porcelain tub. Strands of hair in the sink. The spot of shade between thighs. Pigeons on the landing, iridescent until the light rearranges, shifts to the apartment next-door, unpacks. If you were to paint want back into my skin, it would be with an old brush, streaks of morning blue stained into the bristles. The wood handle smooth, the air in the room tasting most like Spanish olives spooned directly from the can.
January 24, 2025 at 3:12 PM
nyingling.bsky.social
"What you taste with abandon
even God cannot take from you"

-Chris Abani from SMOKING THE BIBLE @coppercanyonpress.bsky.social
Cover of SMOKING THE BIBLE by Chris Abani. WHITE EGRET "The whole earth is filled with the love of God." -KWAME DAWES A stream in a forest and a boy fishing, heart aflame, head hush, tasting the world- lick and pant. The Holy Scripture is animal not book. I should know, I have smoked the soul of God, psalm burning between fingers on an African afternoon. And how is it that death can open up an alleluia from the core of a man? How easily the profound fritters away in words. And the simple wisdom of my brother: What you taste with abandon even God cannot take from you. All my life, men with blackened insides have fought to keep the flutter of a white egret in my chest from bursting into flight, into glory. EJIMA after David St. John That way the Yoruba carve the likeness of a child when its twin dies. Carve a doll for the soul still journeying across a vale of light and shade. Dress it in a tunic of leather, cloth, beads, and cowries. A new birth, a new child, carried by the mother and fed with love and breast milk. Suckled next to the living-flesh to wood, blood to grain, spirit to body. When the soul knows better how to come and go, when the spirit is warmed from anger, slowly, over time, it sits by itself on the shrine, gathers cobwebs and dust and a gentle neglect. Until then, my brother, I carry your doll, a photograph of the child you were, close to my heart. And when you call in the dark I answer, calm your soul, sing it into light. In time, you will join the album on my ancestral shrine and gather cobwebs and the dust from the dust, grow sticky and fat from palm oil and gin, wear your gentle neglect with a hush.
January 13, 2025 at 3:53 PM
nyingling.bsky.social
"In his bath my son looks half-
drowned,
lying so still,

his hair a scarf of weed,
his eyes closed,
and only the water breathing."

-Catherine Barnett from INTO PERFECT SPHERES SUCH HOLES ARE PIERCED @alicejamesbooks.bsky.social
Cover of INTO PERFECT SPHERES SUCH HOLES ARE PIERCED by Catherine Barnett. Ritual In his bath my son looks half- drowned, lying so still, his hair a scarf of weed, his eyes closed, and only the water breathing. He practices in his porcelain bed his resting, rehearsing until the water takes cold and he shivers a little against it. Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced We unstrung necklaces into two glass bowls and passed them round to the mourners. The beads were onyx, agate, quartz, all manner of stone. Everyone was to take two and at the end of the service put one back in my sister's hands. What could she do but collect the round weights all night? She has not restrung them, not wanting to be finished yet with death.
January 8, 2025 at 5:49 PM
nyingling.bsky.social
"if not to sleep, then to obey the dark"
- Jenny George from AFTER IMAGE @coppercanyonpress.bsky.social
Cover of AFTER IMAGE by Jenny George Eclipse All the birds are ill. They flood the elms, driven to roost by a noontime dusk. The trees are full of eyes. One body blots out another body. Isn't that how it works? She died. It floats on my vision like a burn: Hands folded like a bride. Dark cave of the mouth, open-as if a great sound were being drawn in. We were very tired. We covered her in flowers as she cooled. The crescent of her foot hung off the bed. Now the birds are quelled, disturbed and quiet. A strange hour of silk descends. They settle in the trees-- if not to sleep, then to obey the dark. Vivarium Some people collect dirt from significant places. Or spoonfuls of cloudy ocean inside jars. Like amateur naturalists, they keep these treasures permanently on a shelf. Of course an amateur is simply a person who loves, who brings love to bear on a particular subject. Returning from one trip I failed to bring back a jar of anything. I stood outside my house where white stitches of snow were dissolving into the ground beneath the evergreens. An unset moon floated over the trees. If I stand very still, I do no further harm. I am a tiny theater of non-harming. My breath watches raptly. Sees how everything is still alive.
December 31, 2024 at 4:11 PM
nyingling.bsky.social
Spending my holiday with these lovely essays by @williamwoolfitt.bsky.social
Cover of EYES MOVING THROUGH THE DARK by William Woolfitt D Is for Dominion D descends from the Hebrew 7, daleth, from the Greek A, delta, from the shape of a farmhouse door blown open by a snarl of wind, from the rich dirt the river carries to its mouth. D is for dread, deer meat, dump truck, dig down deep. D is for drill, detonate, dove of peace. See it open, see it take wing and lift in the wind, a staked animal skin, a tattered flag, a heavy cloud. Hear it sing the long story of the places that we try to claim, the places that swell our hearts to bursting, hear it sing and then follow its underground threads, the secrets of holding cells and dangerous men waiting for soup in the basement, the masses of pig iron and dross and korl, the smoke of a spoil tip burning in Trace Gap. On our side porch, while we're hunting for his rain boots, the boy spies a bird's nest tucked into my old shoe. "Why," he says. He half-smiles, half-grimaces. Maybe he's surprised, astonished. I'm thinking there are stories my son will need to hear someday-stories about different kinds of looking and taking, the newest Jim Crow-about who breaks the world, who glues the cracks. Maybe I'll tell him or maybe he'll tell me your look can be honest, humble, steady, unafraid, here's current of sorrow, river of light, we're drinking it in. Soon, I'm walking with my son down the quiet road near our house. "That," he says; he means, what is that? He notices everything. "That," he says, and I tell him, cracked asphalt, or drainpipe, or seedpods in the ditch. From my son, I am learning to see.
December 24, 2024 at 6:48 PM
nyingling.bsky.social
"where you awoke last night to find the fabric of space wrinkled /
like the bridge above your nose"
- @rubenq.bsky.social from BRUTAL COMPANION
Cover of BRUTAL COMPANION by Ruben Quesada. A pixelated face lit green and half in shadow. ON PRESENCE For René Magritte Will you see the faces you once heard about from your neighbor's eight-year-old son days before he died, as you look out toward the sky?Those apple-faced angels watching through the drawn curtains of the window where the rain has streaked your view into tobacco- colored sunlight smoking the bedroom; onto the bed where you awoke last night to find the fabric of space wrinkled like the bridge above your nose; remember the disproportionate weight of dark matter heavy on your bottom lip the balm of your body against my mouth
November 14, 2024 at 6:26 PM
nyingling.bsky.social
"box trucks and networks
can be so lonesome, so owned.

& I am alone tonight,
trying to remember that

we don't want
what we think we want."

-Rosie Stockton from PERMANENT VOLTA
Cover of PERMANENT VOLTA by Rosie Stockton Eunuch of Industry I've got some human requirements hornet, injury, toothbrush. technology invented my need and I do I need against schedules lodging my hunger for you and cement sound. what if we kissed in the Amazon locker? crude oil massage, your hand lotion on my choke points your most fresh sacrifice boxed like Blue Apron there's no time to eat rotting in a stoop's sunlight. box trucks and networks can be so lonesome, so owned. & I am alone tonight, trying to remember that we don't want what we think we want. O Plato my Plato I'm calling off our sessions I'm blocking your image & of all your shadows what about the shadow their chains cast?
August 7, 2024 at 3:48 PM
nyingling.bsky.social
"I am the body next to but unlike yours.
You already know me. You already know what I'm made of."

-Rachel Zucker from MUSEUM OF ACCIDENTS
Don't Say Anything Beautiful Kiss Me Anyway, if my lips were rose petals they'd taste too bitter. If my cheeks were apples they'd crawl with apple worms. If my eyes were stars they'd be dead by the time you saw them. If I moved you like the moon I'd disappear once a month. If my teeth were Chiclets you'd want to chew on them and spit them out. If my hands were birds you couldn't hold them; they'd peck you bloody. Is my skin alabaster? Then it's cold and hard and one day someone will skin me, make me into a cold hard box tinged with pink or yellow, to hold unguents, then how will you love me? If my vagina is a cool, dark forest you'll certainly be lost, you have no sense of direction. If my vagina is a cave—watch out! It's prone to seismic shifts and avalanche. If my vagina is a river of honey: orange, lavender, fine herbs, hazelnut, all too sweet. If my ears are shells I can't hear you, only the ocean anyway. And if my voice is music, it is unintelligible. Don't say anything...
August 4, 2024 at 4:54 PM
nyingling.bsky.social
"Not All Kindnesses Are Futile

Which is the opposite of saying people are proof
of God"
- @susanlleary.bsky.social from DRESSING THE BEAR.
The cover of DRESSING THE BEAR by Susan L. Leary
July 1, 2024 at 2:44 PM
nyingling.bsky.social
"It Is Like

the baby's shock at first light, weeping.

The metaphors for panic dissatisfy me"

-Cindy Juyoung Ok from WARD TOWARD
Cover of WARD TOWARD by Cindy Juyoung Ok It Is Like the baby's shock at first light, weeping. The metaphors for panic dissatisfy me by comparing the internal to the external --weight, containment, suffocation, screaming, itching--which it is not like. I have known well molasses and bubbles and I'm sorry but it is not a plural substance nor is it a place, not an enclosed elevator or some classy cliff. It is the moment of the first, a moment that becomes a life. It is like melting; it is like wanting and even so it is like not wanting. It refuses, I promise, all language, and requires the ruination of the self, of narration. (continued in next image) The opposite of resignation, the startle extends, leaving relief only in accepting the diminishing options: sink water is cool to the dunk, and a hum can slow the heart's best. Physical exertion also confuses memory into thinking there is no terror, only strain. The baby, too, is tricked eventually into betrayal--stroking light switches, beginning to speak. But when it is like what it is like, these materials are too effortful and the quickening song of the ringing phone does not console when the body comes to be its panic.
June 27, 2024 at 2:52 PM
nyingling.bsky.social
"You can't behead eternity—

so we scratch its surface.

And by surface I mean your skin"
-Alisha Dietzman from SWEET MOVIE
Cover of SWEET MOVIE by Alisha Dietzman The Last Judgment--Giotto Di Bondone Fresco-Secco: There is a disinterest in lasting: we say we were not made for this; we do not have long-haul bodies, we peel and drip, yet don't drain. You can't behead eternity-- so we scratch its surface. And by surface I mean your skin with my free hand. I mean your mouth when I can. I mean your head. I pull your hair like wheat.
June 24, 2024 at 4:04 PM
nyingling.bsky.social
"In some ways so glorious is the world I forget / how terrible it is"

-Melissa Crowe from LO
Cover of LO, a poetry collection by Melissa Crowe GENERAL ABSOLUTION In some ways so glorious is the world I forget how terrible it is--leaning over a ditch of purple weeds and runoff, alive with pulsing frogs the size of fingertips, the flutter of their tiny throats, the pinpricks of their black and shiny eyes, their skin a green that's somehow tenderer than pink, I think, This is enough to have come here for. Today I sat in a bath so hot I said fuck as I sank and, sweating and stinging, drank a glass of ice water, chewed every cube, though if I crack my teeth I can't afford to have them fixed. Bliss, bliss and forgetting, and between sips I read a book about 9/11, learned that when the first tower collapsed, a man running from the wave of debris begged a fire department chaplain for forgiveness, and the chaplain said he'd offered general absolution the moment the building started to fall--general absolution, all souls granted mercy in an instant--the cops, the accountants, the jumpers, the hijackers, straight to heaven, made clea
June 20, 2024 at 5:21 PM
nyingling.bsky.social
I have a book of poems out today. Very grateful to Barrow Street Press and the poets, all literary heroes of mine, who were kind enough to blurb it. ❤️
April 15, 2024 at 5:13 PM
nyingling.bsky.social
"She wrote that an enlarged mind is no use
and muttered over her dead friend.

She could nut mutter over me, unborn:
a fire not yet in her eye."
- @jessicacuello.bsky.social from YOURS, CREATURE
Dear Sweden 1795, She wrote that an enlarged mind is no use and muttered over her dead friend. She could nut mutter over me, unborn: a fire not yet in her eye. She still gazed toward the bridge's ledge. She didn't know I would do it for her: Be her little murderer. My own afterbirths came out like floors of flesh, pink animals the child and I kneaded together. Hers stayed inside the first room of death. They put me in a stranger's arms. But back when they pulled her from the river where she tried to drown, the room I would occupy in her was warm. Yours, in London 1820, M.S. (daughter of M. Wollstonecraft)
March 13, 2024 at 3:18 PM
nyingling.bsky.social
"As the baby pulled the cold air into her lungs,
I saw a nurse take her tiny foot,
press it into a pad of blue ink,

and write with her body

her body"
-Carolina Hotchandani from THE BOOK EATERS
IN THE BEGINNING As the baby pulled the cold air into her lungs, I saw a nurse take her tiny foot, press it into a pad of blue ink, and write with her body her body as if my baby were, at once, the pen and the word.
March 6, 2024 at 6:11 PM
nyingling.bsky.social
"In the kitchen, a cure of honey
curls over
what rot hasn't won yet."
- @rachelsedelman.bsky.social from DEAR MEMPHIS @riverriverbooks.bsky.social
THE SOUTH I KNOW BEST In the kitchen, a cure of honey curls over what rot hasn't won yet. Overnight, some creature tumped over the feeder. Seed pockmarks the walnut shade where no grass grows. On the other side of the hammock trees low brick walls brushed white. The dog bursts from the magnolia's tendrils out of a hole I can't slide through no matter how deeply I bow.
March 1, 2024 at 4:17 PM
nyingling.bsky.social
"By the time the angels intervened
the ache had long fled the fields,

irretrievable by then"
-Sarah Ghazal Ali from THEOPHANIES
AURAT By the time the angels intervened the ache had long fled the fields, irretrievable by then, and what it took from me was gone. There were no letters left to taste in the chosen language of God and only english was left to me, only english absolved me of what was coaxed from my lap while I looked away and through the window open like an eye over the bed. Desire made a door of me and I kept it ajar. In my mother's house I revert to her body's bloom. In her language a woman is what she shrouds, skin paling under cloth, a chamber of grit and two- lipped rooms. In the language of revelation I'm told this word is a slur, means defective or deficient. From navel to knee, it marks me a garden to be raked clean by my husband. Vulnerable is a body beneath a body beneath a shared gray sheet. It was April, evening, one star glinting in the maw. I lay still. I didn't bleed.
February 26, 2024 at 4:01 PM
nyingling.bsky.social
"Each syllable holds
hours

Each letter: minutes, moments—

Time is a child
a black child

playing tag with their shadow"

-Kweku Abimbola from SALTWATER DEMANDS A PSALM
Our names: Our days Each syllable holds hours Each letter: minutes, moments— Time is a child a black child playing tag with their shadow in a field of juniper— above this chase, the sun sips indigo
February 23, 2024 at 5:03 PM