Lavina Blossom

Inspiration piece

What They Found

Robbi Nester

Response

In the stories we have passed down forever
on steles and carved stones, on paper
and skins worn thin by the hands of many
there were two in the garden
lying naked and warm in the deep grass
where it was always summer
under the shade of trees older than the world:
the ripe pomegranate and the pear.
Tiny blue-eyed flowers speckled the grass.
They needed only to reach out a hand
and sweet fruit would find the open palm.
But even then, the mind was a weapon
a sharpened stick. In the stories
they climbed the wall, wanting
to learn what was out there.
Beyond lay a world ripe for making
where the sun burned cold
retreating by night.
They needed skins, needed to take lives
so they themselves could live.
In the image, grainy figures
the deep pink of sandstone
scrawled shadows against a blue
ground face away, toward glaciers,
endless fields of blue ice.
They cannot climb back over the wall.
The way is barred.
They can only go forward
into the deadly and beautiful future
their blessing and curse.

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My Memory Palace
By Robbi Nester
Inspiration piece

The ancients found remembering was simple

if they built in memory a place to stash

each name or fact. I have no need

of this old tactic. The building rose itself,

no mere mnemonic, without my effort

or my will, needing no intention on my part

to make it stand, secluded, a palace

or a prison on a street not quite the one I knew.

For years, I wore the windows watching out,

aspiring to the world beyond this

faded square of sky, though sometimes

it might hint at nascent drama:

coiled green hose a lurking

mamba. And there, the borders

of a country yet  to be discovered:

the spot I scratched into the wallpaper

beside my bed, hoping if I made it

big enough I could climb through, like

the children in the books I read,

entering another world.

The clothes hang still, waiting forever

to be worn. And there, my mother’s vanity,

where I  would sit and gaze into the glass

trying on her earrings  and her pearls, her

broad-shouldered jackets, inspecting

photographs of relatives I’d never meet,

all this spreads before me, each room

multiplied in memory, a sheaf of dining rooms;

the living room in all its incarnations.

Here, the French provincial sideboard, gift

of a wealthy relative, rules the room;

and now, eclipsed–an avalanche of envelopes

encroaches. And now the roaches

and the rats, the bags of trash I helped to clear away.

No people walk these rooms; no conversations

can be heard. Harsh words and gentle ones

do not endure. Only the doors and windows

where I walk in dream and reverie

fan out like drafts, an intricate origami I could

never fathom.  Now that these walls

are someone else’s legacy, I can never leave.

My Body Becomes the World
By Robbi Nester
Response

Roan Mountain
By Katie Helms
Inspiration piece

For years, I have lived in this body,

worked it, let it take me wherever it would go,

walking the city streets for miles.

I never  had to think about what lay under

the surface, where the lungs rise and fall,

twin islands in  the arteries’  flow.

Just yesterday,  with other women

wondering about the world

inside they could not see,

I studied the pelvis,  tipped

slightly forward like a leaky pot.

The uterus and vulva nest within,

neat as a  matryoshka. In the back,

a triangular frill of bone

delicate as hand-made lace

anchors it all to the spine.

Today I am examining a watercolor landscape:

layered hills, moving toward summer sea swells,

translucent greens and blues laid lightly

like a veil, the mist that rises over the hills

in early light.  But as I look,

the hills become a cross section

of flesh on a tinted slide.

Inside or outside, from

the window or in

the microscope’s bright

arc, inside and out

seem just alike, subject

to tides and the vagaries of weather.