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Letter to America: Poem by Nicole Broadhurst
"Welcome, Little Stranger"

Letter to America by Nicole Broadhurst

One Poem

S.T.F.U.D.

Eichmann, Mengele, the pupil-drowning dread is allied to Awe.
Awe capitalized, since this has always been God’s show. See
here: when the message of Love is trampled by the billion-ton ox,
8 million greasy spots & counting, will you follow My command?
What Chlorox? It’s a nimble itty-bitty hoe-down here today! Boys,
the nitty-gritty: Walter Huston’s eyes are gleaming like gold, & now
are constellations in sky, a lavender & mauve petal of breast-
feather tucked-up purling to the universal rib of that great black bird:
What Bosom? What Eye? “I am very sorry for you” you say
to the brain-damaged father who kills his brain-damaged son,
“I know you’re not who you wanted to be.” If you unlock this present
is a tortured Christ revealed? “I deserve someone who loves me,
who grows from my happiness, not feeds off my distress.”
Wheel of ivory, wheel of onyx, & gold, & the most precious: wood,
lie down in the waterfall of the leaves’ rustle, the fish are in
their atmosphere unblinking, the net, the knife, the spuming plume of
redistribution. Vengeance is Mine, saith the Lord. Invite the Tiger
& give up your organs he who is without anger, for the innocent
must eat the swine who are pearls. As a pearl is lapped
by a cradling planet, her luminescence coated in all colors. 

Letter to America: Poem by Nicole Broadhurst

 

 

Nicole BroadhurstNicole Broadhurst is an old married couple all by herself! Still she attends the fountain, of her 800-page SOUVENIR. Recently published work appears in the July/August 2017 issue of Zocalo.

“Welcome, Little Stranger” is a detail from her collage of 1999.

Read poetry by Nicole Broadhurst appearing in Terrain.org.