Two Poems by Morgan Nikola-Wren: Yours, Our Mother's and Mine; and Wrapped and Wrangled

Two Poems
by Morgan Nikola-Wren

Yours, Our Mother’s and Mine

Your trusty DDD breasts
Pulled your skeletal body
Downward
As you clung to your IV rack
Like it was a lover
Just as emaciated as you

You had given it a name
I think it was “Ollie.”
And it could almost pass
For a passionate embrace
When you and your tubes
Tangled around him
Desperate to keep your feet

Your own body
Spilling itself out
In rivers of shit and vomit
Seeping down the raw grain
Of wooden floor
That we all melted down to
Helpless

You
Our mother
And I

My young eyes
Two wide smatterings
Of gold flecks in perfect mud circles
(Like the pans at the gold mine
From my fourth grade Sacramento tri)
Had never seen anything like it

And our insides all collapsed
Deflated

Yours
Our mother’s
And mine

As laughter shook us all
Rough
And harder than it had
In a miniature eternity

Wrapped and Wrangled

and so, wrapping him up
in black velvet embrace
that spellbound night
slid down his throat
by way of enigma-laced kiss

‘til his proper brass buttons
strained beneath the swell
for those twin zeppelins
that hid deep
inside his ribcage
were at long last
growing up with every
gulp of starlight
and each
gasping wish
that the night
now trapped inside him
would unscrew
his shoes from the ground
and float him
lighter and laughing
away from it all

but it is never that easy
and the moon sighed a smirk
sympathetic
as those crafts shot up
launching out of his mouth
and away with his heart
that skipped between them
limping
like some blithely broken
Dickensian orphan

and so, the three swam on
just slow enough
for him to follow
but only if
he ran his fastest
through every shipwreck and bruise
‘til he finally found himself
in that place he’d always searched for
in the corner of his sad little smile

Morgan Nikola-Wren attended college to study Theatre Arts, but ended up staying up scribbling manically until 3AM for many-a-night. She favors sweeping, lyrical prose with a satiric bite, and moments that stir you from a place inside you can’t even name. Her work has appeared in Scissors and Spackle Magazine, Clover: A Literary Rag, Grey Sparrow Journal and Vine Leaves Literary. Upcoming publications include Tule Review, Paper Nautilus and Writers and Lovers Café.

Copyright 2014, © Morgan Nikola-Wren. This work is protected under the U.S. copyright laws. It may not be reproduced, reprinted, reused, or altered without the expressed written permission of the author.