I'm not a love-bot anymore I no longer have to hide Behind dead eyes And a plastic smile It's over I'm safe now Never again Never Ever Ever Again -Elena Nola (circa Sept. 2018)
Nirvana Bourbon
Another perfume poem. This one was published in the spring 2020 edition of Thimble Literary Magazine, volume 2.4.
“Nirvana Bourbon”
The smell of the glue I used to repair my shattered self Isn’t the carcinogenic burn of polymers, but vanilla Not the pods, but the extract, boozy and opaque Sharply alcoholic but too thick to be a cocktail A tarrish smear between broken edges The scent pervasive because I used a lot of resin Not from overapplication—there were just so many pieces The drying fumes were many things to my mosaic soul Warmth and beauty, the comfort of familiar The solace of tradition and the escape from memory Deliciousness, exoticness, expensiveness, permissiveness I used them all to tether mind to body, heart to chest For a time I was more glue than woman, more dead than living The channels of adhesive no substitute for veins I hovered in the cloud above my curing skin Taking refuge in vanilla, and hiding in the lie That if I could still find beauty, then I must be all right -Elena Nola
Like Roses in November
I am slowly writing toward a collection of poems about the interplay of the scent, comfort, and beauty of perfume as a sensory anchor for me during some of the hardest years of my life. This poem is one of them. It was published in the "Autumn" 2019 edition of Songs of Eretz.
“Like Roses in November”
There's a certain kind of sadness To roses in November Flowers blooming in a world That otherwise is dying The color more intense For its contrast to the brown The living edged with danger With winter coming on For what will freezing nights inflict On saturated branches? The beauty melancholy-cast For it will not last the month The end of all its glory, Already past its prime But still it dominates the landscape, All its rivals now outshone Today it yet is beauty The future not yet come -Elena Nola
Roses and Thorns
Four interlocking poems, published in 2019 at Mammouth Poetry which has an “all or nothing” acceptance policy. You can go read them over there (always appreciated, along with the rest of the issue) or continue below.
This set of poems was written in late 2017, and the imagery of their metaphor has become firmly embedded in my personal cosmology and symbolism.
“Roses and Thorns”
A poetic sequence
I
Born on a bed of roses
Amidst sheets of petals
Into the embrace of thorns.
When piercing barbs are omnipresent,
They do not feel like pain;
They feel like home.
“Look at the beauty,” they say,
And point to the blooms.
Such softness.
Such fragrance.
Such color –
Vibrant riots of life –
And it is, indeed,
Beautiful.
That is life in the briar patch:
Unrecognized pain, and a profusion of wonder.
Is it any wonder, then,
That no one sees the blood?
II
“Those thorns become you,”
Come the insidious whispers
As the vines wrap around
Wrist, or
Thigh, or
Throat,
Black lace over moonlit skin,
Natural as midnight shadows,
And just as prone to lies.
The pretty patterns never show
The pricks and scrapes of thorns,
The praiseful words dismissing
The pain and sense of fear
As the vines sink under
Skin, or
Flesh, or
Vein,
Tattoos under gothic parchment,
Embedded horror as concealed
As sin or tarnished name.
The pulsing tracery of veins
Never seems macabre;
The twisting vines concealed
By smooth and youthful skin
As the thorns push into
Nerves, or
Blood, or
Bone.
Bruises beneath silver satin,
Blooming heirloom roses,
Petals made of blood.
The thriving lines of green wood
Twine around the limbs
And furl their leaves on bone
As the thorns
Become
You.
III
A slash of parting skin,
A welling pearl of red –
No. Not a jewel.
A rosebud.
As the vein opens wider,
The flower unfurls
En futuro rapiditas,
Taking only moments
To burst in scarlet blossom,
Beauty blooming out of anguish,
So striking and so shocking,
No one sees the damage.
No wonder it attracted
A lover of the dark
Who placed the color masterfully.
Death by a thousand cuts,
A mosaic of red roses
Making art from torment.
The saddest figure ever drawn
Of a woman wrapped in garlands:
Every petal paid with pain
And no observer ever wiser.
IV
Skin so soft and softly pale,
Cream lit by winter’s pallid sun,
Barely more than white.
But in the blinding summer blaze
The truth can’t be unseen;
It bears a maze of pearly blight –
Scars in shapes of roses.
A garden can be traced across
The canvas of her flesh.
There a vine and here a thorn,
Blooms and buds and crossing bowers,
A bounty of those ghostly flowers.
A ghastly tale told without words
But only in their absence.
Rosebush embedded under skin,
Excised by pulling it from bones.
Up through muscle, out through nerves,
A desperate screaming purge.
How great the pain inside herself
To suffer that extraction?
How long did healing take to render
Gaping slashes into welts
And welts to moonlit tracings
Of pain that once but is no more?
Her skin is lovely, soft and smooth,
Flawless at first glance,
But lovelier by far when eye discerns
What lies beneath to glimpse
The horror in her past.
Born into a bed of roses,
Its seeds left in her soul.
She walks outside its confines now;
Nothing lives in her, but her.
She is but what she appears:
A dark and pale beauty
With roses in her hair.
-Elena Nola
The Alchemist
This poem is one of my favorite things I’ve ever written. It’s a perfect form Petrarchan sonnet, and a poem that was adapted into that form from free-verse after I realized I had written 15 lines in something approaching iambic pentameter and with a very obvious question/answer.
It was originally published in Riddled with Arrows issue 2.3, Objects and Artifacts, in November 2018.
“The Alchemist”
No pointed hat nor sweeping robe required,
Nor lonely lamp-lit tower stabbing sky.
No pedant’s cant, archaic chant to ply,
Nor pestles filled with mortared coal expired.
The iron discipline of midnight fires
And winding dark roads walked alone, though, aye;
Unflinching yen to face the truth of why,
And burning will to manifest desires.
All I need for alchemy is my quill
And paper blank. I dip it in my vein
Of sorrow, let my sadness over-spill,
Transmuting into words my darkest pain.
A minor compensation for my ills,
To pages, not my soul, leave thusly stained.
-Elena Nola
“You Are the Commodity, Your Time Is the Coin”
Or, “It’s OK to Simply Be Sometimes”
Everyone in the world keeps asking me for my attention
My time for their words, idea, perspective
My focus on what they made
Because they hope to change me
Some days I feel willing to be changed
But lately all I want is to heed the call of the dew on the garden
Still in shadow from the rising sun
To sit with the birdsong
Still in shadow from the rising sun
To sit with the birdsong
And the warming cloak of silence
And let myself stay exactly as I am
And let myself stay exactly as I am
-Elena Nola
The Tarot Tree in Riddled with Arrows 2.2!
I am very pleased to share that my first online publication was with Riddled with Arrows, a journal of meta-writing and meta-poetry that is just lovely and fun for people who like writing and writing about writing (and maybe even writing about writing about writing…it’s writing all the way down!). For those of you who know anything about my undergraduate program, Plan II at UT Austin, you know meta is like…Our Thing. Or, at least, it was, 15 years ago. I assume it still is, because, some things don’t change.
Anyway.
I’ve also always been drawn to poetry and writing that acknowledges itself as such. I would never want it to be the only thing I read, and certainly not the only thing I write…but I am supremely self-referential and have to keep a conscious throttle on not inserting myself into everything, not demolishing the frame that holds the picture as if it is truth. Look through my eyes becomes impossible if authorial self is present, if a reminder that this imaginary object is imaginary is inserted. So often I remove such lines when they sneak in, or choose not to write from that angle, and when I find something I cannot not write from that angle, I wonder who would ever want to read it besides me? It is pretentious, is it not, to talk about one’s work within the work?
But sometimes there is a value in calling a spade a spade. Some things cannot be said obliquely, but only with direct acknowledgment of medium. And thus, my contribution to Riddled with Arrows Issue 2.2 “The Invisible World”.
Updated 2021 to include the text of my poem here, but I encourage you to go read it and/or the full issue over there!
* * *
“The Tarot Tree”
One picture might be worth a thousand words,
But what of things that eyes alone can’t see?
The staggering display of tree surfeit with fructed life—
The Empress in complacent bounty sits
Her red and gold and green, and peace,
O’erlaying limbs of taupe and umber fountaining.
An incandescent cloak of purest green
Like water’s spray, translucent in the sun,
The streaming gold behind it limning leaves with halos bright.
No image ever could quite capture
Both figure and suggested form.
The lines could never strike you thus
Across all time and space.
But words can hold both tree and queen
Entwined into one aspect new,
For words reveal what image can’t:
In words appears the mind.
-Elena Nola
