A Poetry Squawk
By Nicole Callihan
Author of SuperLoop and A Study in Spring (with Zoe Ryder White)
I.
All weekend, my husband made me work in the yard. I put on soft, yellow gloves and pushed my sleeves up. I must admit I am a reluctant gardener, but I do love the feel of the sun on my skin, and if I practice long enough, the rhythm starts to settle in: the eight-inch spacing, the weight of the spade, a handful of manure, a bundle of bulbs or tangle of roots. Yesterday, we planted the whole hill with periwinkle vinca; last week’s azaleas are blazing; the rhododendrons seem promising. Sometimes neighbors stop, and we talk about deer or the weather. Late in the afternoon, I stand in the shower and wash the earth off my body. I welcome it: it’s been such a long time since I’ve seen actual dirt going down the drain.
II.
I don’t know why I believed so thoroughly that if I began digging a hole in my tiny, dull North Carolina town, and dug and dug with my blue plastic shovel through the soft and hard and fiery layers, I would find, on the other side of the dense mad planet: China. I guess it was as good a way as any for the daycare workers to keep us busy. Here, kid, go dig a hole to China. I imagined first finding those tiny cobs of corn, the ones we got in every take-out dish we ordered from the Double Happiness in Wilmington, and then there would be strangers and rickshaws. The sky would be a whole different blue, and every cookie would hold the future.
III.
My mother is haunted by a dream in which she kills a man and buries his body. I must have been seven or eight when she first told me about him, but she’s had the dream for as long as she can remember. Sometimes she buries the body under the pecan tree in her childhood backyard, or out behind the reservation house where we lived in South Dakota, or in the field near the apartment we first rented in Tulsa, or just south of the duck pond at the big white house that she saved and saved to buy. I don’t think she’s ever been caught; her dream operates entirely around the fear that she’ll be discovered.
IV.
And so, why do I write? I think that’s the question I’m supposed to be answering. Well, I write to feel the sun on my arms, to embrace the tedium, to learn the names of things, to watch it all bloom after a long, long winter. And I write, too, to go someplace far away from where I am, to dig and dig, and find, on the other side of the world, in Madrid or Amsterdam or Tokyo, a stranger who might share a meal or a cigarette with me, who might understand something I’m also trying to understand. And then, of course, there are the bodies. Let’s just say: I’ve got to have somewhere to bury them.
Nicole Callihan writes poems, stories and essays. Her work has appeared in, among others, The American Poetry Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Forklift, Ohio, PANK, and as a Poem-a-Day feature from the Academy of American Poets. Her books include A Study in Spring (with Zoë Ryder White), winner of the 2015 Baltic Writing Residency Chapbook Contest; the 2012 nonfiction Henry River Mill Village (with Ruby Young Kellar); and SuperLoop (Sock Monkey Press, 2014). Her chapbook The Deeply Flawed Human is forthcoming from Deadly Chaps Press in July 2016. Nicole lives with her husband and daughters in Brooklyn, New York.