NICOLE HIGGINS, FEATURED IN THE NEW OCEAN STATE REVIEW

Soft Kitchen with Tea Towel and Flames

We arrive after the holiday to practice
the new technology.

You play at the airplane
briefly until no and no, hunger drying up

in the season of cake and campaigns.
You don’t sing to me anymore.

I tell time by curlicues stroked or the forest
of abandoned cups multiplying against memory.

As for me and my mouth/hands/knees
I am learning they remain

about the business of prayer and where the sounds go
when they leave my body. What did you mean

to make this shape with yours?

The pastor says lekh lekha and I go on.
I jot the words like a recipe on a Post-it         trying

to remember the one where Dorothy manifests
terra firma in an untrained voice—

was there laughter
or a bird or fermata?

“Soft Kitchen with Tea Towel and Flames” was written across several years and spaces, its “you” shifting and slipping each time I thought I might be close to grasping some clarity. The poem departs right away from an off-the-page occasion of quaint kitchen bliss and crescendos with disaster. There are gestures toward containing the thing, tamping it down with language or glossing over confusion and heartbreak with steady attendance to the tasks at hand—feed your loved one, write—and, ultimately, the concession that desire and resolve are not solo acts. In this way, the poem enacts a faith—there’s a world turned on its head with all the expectations intact, and I’m here, feeling my way through the strange landscape, moving deliberately toward what feels pressing rather than what feels easily possible.

Nicole Higgins is a poet and assistant professor of English and Africana Studies at the University of Central Missouri. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem and Callaloo, and her poems appear in the museum of americana, Dream Pop, Pleiades, Storyscape, Bear Review, Sink Review, Vinyl, and elsewhere.