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Prophecy IV: The Path Toward Thirst

Writer's picture: Editorial StaffEditorial Staff

By Nicole Rollender

John the Baptist’s head on a platter. Night begins with this beheading, but also blooming: skull-colored tuberose bleeding paradise’s sweet scent of a bird calling in an abyss. A piece of ambergris the Black Sea washed up. Honey frozen in the comb. My grandmother, as a girl, found this hardened secretion from a whale’s intestine. She’s gone, as the whale, as the stories she threaded & frayed for me at bedtime. The scent of her childhood still in my hair, as if I was returning to her village. Except the ambergris warming in my hand, its many fragrant rooms like fruit falling, miles of sea, footsteps on the stairs between years, the question remaining: How did it feel when God entered your ribs, pushing you out, branches growing into rain? Explain the sorrow left in your pelvis, moon reflecting the bird building its path before nightfall. The work of flight builds my homecoming.

A 2017 NJ Council on the Arts poetry fellow, Nicole Rollender is the author of the poetry collection, Louder Than Everything You Love (Five Oaks Press), and four poetry chapbooks. She has won poetry prizes from Palette Poetry, Gigantic Sequins, CALYX Journal and Ruminate Magazine. Her work appears in Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New Poets, Ninth Letter, Puerto del Sol, Salt Hill Journal and West Branch, among many other journals. Nicole is managing editor of THRUSH Poetry Journal, and holds an MFA from the Pennsylvania State University. She’s also co-founder and CEO of Strand Writing Services. Visit her online: www.nicolemrollender.com.

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