Two poems by Michelle Nickol

START SURVEYMONKEY

Survey time starts you up.  

            — Anonymous

Some monkeys hoard monkey-word-starters that won’t be left alone.  Some 

monkeys don’t.  Monkey world like javelina.  Some monkeys rev monkey-

word-hash.  Even after swing time, even after survey-eclipse and javelina 

stomp.

Q:  Hey Monkey, you might ask, or even want to ask, why you

      hash monkey like a javelina monkey starter?  

A:  Don’t Know.  Something swings in, peels breakfast lunch              and dinner down.  Swing thought comes.  Then world time 

    eclipse.  What to do but hash it?

Swing it, monkey starter!  Rev it up!  This monkey’s giving monkey-word-revers.  

Survey arms good for this kinda monkey swing hash.  Go monkey, go—hash and 

re-hash monkey javelina swing.  (Pssst… sometimes there’s no javelina-brake.  

If so, leave monkey-rev-world alone for awhile.)

END SURVEYMONKEY

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Remembrance of Thimble

A stitch in time repairs it so once upon some the seamstress began the sortings.  Through button boxes, pin stacks and cushions, through curves and sharps of things her stubby sun-frescoed fingers nibbled and probed.  The bobbins have an exact capacity for flame, she thought.  Observe their need for witness       ∂       The caretaker in the stone cabin down the road slops his sweat-haloed shirt cuff through the brindled gravy.  Potato starch, he thinks to himself.  Darn it!  Clogs the buttonholes       ∂       The seamstress talks with an average of 5.6 people in three-minute segments during her work day.  Some have traveled over boglands, ferns, coastlines, shrubs, woody vines, clumps of slender-stemmed branches and countertops to reach her       ∂       Along the road between the caretaker’s cabin and the seamstresses’ shop there’s a bullfrog in a pond.  Its deep, ripply song bulges in the middle.  It is strenuous.  On a muddy stretch beside a green jab of willows, having spent seven years in partial seclusion on rough-textured surfaces, the bullfrog leaves an impression, a configuration known only to phillumenists       ∂       The seamstress didn’t wash her hair that day.  The caretaker didn’t stop to pick lilacs.  All day long the muscles in the robin’s throat grew taut, relaxed, grew taut.  It wanted to wound.  It wanted to be wound backwards.  It wanted to sing, This steeple, this steeple, these quills       ∂       Dear Half Moon, in your pale distance, who would have dreamt the soft hill above the brown church?  The townspeople are talking.  I think they make excessive use of agricultural products.  She clusters five slender needles in a bundle.  What part of speech is soil?

Author bio: 

Michelle Nickol works real hard at a 100% solar powered independent bookstore in Tucson, Arizona where she spends what little spare time she has hiking as far away from rattlesnakes as possible.  She has previously published poems in Prairie Schooner, Gestalten, Blue Guitar Magazine, Black Warrior Review, etc.  and is currently working on a manuscript which she prefers not to talk about right now.