Two Poems by Nicole Caruso Garcia

Song of Solidarity
        For Dustin Brookshire, after reading his book To the One Who Raped Me

No matter I’m a woman, you’re a man,
and yours hurt you one night and mine one morning;
although we’ve yet to meet, our poems touch:

We hate to say the word…yet say it.
Why didn’t we fight back against those traitors?
When nailed upon a cross, it’s hard to run.

How is it we eschew the label victim,
yet crown ourselves with something sharp as shame?
How can we tell our parents we are stillborn?

Some artifacts must burn (for you, the mattress);
are these our proxies for self-immolation?
A smile, a joke, a lyric, or a movie

may be a landmine, yet we’re told, Calm down.
We can’t, not with calm so close to claim.
So let us conjure no more images

of dogs, for even Fido learns to yield
to No, a word conditioned out of some men.
They’re neither dogs nor monsters. Just ordinary.

Now are you not self-salvaged, welded, wrought
from wreckage, as am I, a makeshift dreadnought?
Archimedes says, displace your trauma.

It costs so dearly, the luxury of softness,
so while we sleep, our red, red books take aim.
New lovers learn our sovereign terrain.

*

After Explaining to My Mother Why We Need
Solar Eclipse Glasses, I Recall My Childhood
        For my mother, April 8, 2024

In trouble, dead to rights, at first I would
avert my gaze, not out of deference
when, not unlike a beautiful Medusa,
you’d stop and grab me by the sassy chin:
Look at me when I’m talking to you.
Obedient, I stared into the sun:
the sun so very disappointed in me,
the sun that wished to low-key murder me.

Your glowing hydrogen and helium
a constant source of warmth, you helped me grow,
yet gave no quarter from your gamma rays.
All other punishments weren’t half as wise.
Mother star, you forged me, don’t forget.
There’s no stare that I can’t meet now. No sweat.

*

Nicole Caruso Garcia’s full-length debut OXBLOOD (Able Muse Press) recently received the International Book Award for narrative poetry. Her work appears in Best New Poets, Light, Mezzo Cammin, Plume, Rattle, RHINO, and elsewhere. She serves as associate poetry editor at Able Muse and as an executive board member at Poetry by the Sea, an annual poetry conference in Madison, CT. Visit her at nicolecarusogarcia.com.