Nicky Beer

Elegy

I never liked the dead boy.
When the accident happened,
he became our parents’ lessons
to us about being careful. They even
seemed to love him a little
for how useful he’d become.
I spent the school assembly
they gave him looking at the necks
of all the kids in front of me,
imagining a blue dot centered
on each one, like buttons
waiting to be jabbed.
The blow-up photo
had a dopey haze to it,
and he squinted back
at us as though through
a steambath of honey.
Everyone cried, even
the assistant principal he’d once
called a Bitch to her face.
Light peered through
the high windows’ mesh,
stopped short in mid-
air,  touching nothing
but a sullen ribbon
caught in the rafters,
dangling the rubber
of its spent balloon.
I already knew it
would never drop
in my lifetime.

---

Kindness/Kindling

Everyone loved the girl whose house burned down. The number of party invitations must have exhausted her, and we buried her under piles of new dolls and stuffed animals, which must have made it difficult for her to love any one especially. She was gravely awarded first sniff of the cherry magic marker. Class photo, front and center. Girl Whose House Burned Down for class president, Girl Whose House Burned Down for hall monitor, Girl Whose House Burned Down for kickball captain. We wished she’d broken her arm so that we might have written ourselves on her, hearts for “i’s,”  4EVA—our names the last thing she’d  see before she fell asleep. We would have liked it if she could have trailed her char and sorrow through our lives endlessly. But by the time her family got a new house, she’d already folded back into us with little fanfare: mediocre Girl Scout, milk-spiller, spelling bee runner-up. Her kitten sweatshirt came to seem slightly tacky, her understated lisp suddenly impossible to ignore. Now and then we’d catch her face in the crowded bathroom mirror and shrug. Even so, we could not help pressing our fingers into the soft bellies of our carnival bears, our thin, dry voices whispering c-o-n-f-l-a-g-r-a-t-i-o-n.

---

Nessun Dorma

The nurses’ station was an offstage quartet
endlessly tuning up
as the late night greased my forehead.
I counted the blue fermatas on his gown
until the numbers slurred.

Those hours were a beige braid of dementia
throughout which my grandfather
did not know my name, but cried out
help me  help me  help me
like the panicked bell of a buoy.

His ulcerous feet were propped and strapped
into quilted sheaths
like haughty coloraturas--
I was frightened by the ruin of his warped toes,
and because I was a coward, touched them.

I’d had terrible plans for the woman
in the framed Impressionist print above his bed,
her spattered face pinkly serene
over her piano, drawing out each note
she surrendered like a terrified wire.

You’re hurting me, no matter
how gently I held his hand—though he may
have been talking to the light
that had crawled from under the curtains
and door to warp his face.

The oldest story is someone waiting for dawn.
A mouth opens in a reverse aria:
the last music rushes in.




--
Nicky Beer is the author of The Octopus Game (Carnegie Mellon, 2015) and The Diminishing House (Carnegie Mellon, 2010), both winners of the Colorado Book Award for Poetry. Her work has been published in Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, Poetry, The Nation, and elsewhere. Her awards include an NEA fellowship, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a scholarship and fellowship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Mary Wood Fellowship from Washington College. She is an associate professor at the University of Colorado Denver, where she serves as a poetry editor for the literary journal Copper Nickel.