Three Poems from Nicole Borrello

Velvet Thinking

I’d like to think I could be the one.
Suffocating your lips into fascination.
Hemorrhaging through your fornicating thighs.
A swell in your tongue. A bloom in your salty spit.
Can’t be the blue-eyed girl with the smeared mouth
or the cinnamon tart with the acorn eyes.
Just a peddler of pale feeding on fur.
Sitting between an imaginary garden
and its layered boughs, I meet a silken
flower that brings me to my knees and then departs.



Stained Sheet

Tangled in sheets of cotton bloom.
Wrapped in line-dried emotion.
I’ve always been bruised by sexual
motive, but now everything hangs
like mistletoe waiting for
a kiss. Fresh with crush, I’m flung from
the body and blood of Christ. Mouth
empty and wondering in abbey silence.
The hand that caresses me,
is the hand that strangles me.
A gorgeous example of boy untying
train-track girl then disappearing
into the fields. The loss consumes me.



Floating Morgue

She views her emotions from a sailboat.
When the wind changes, the world becomes
lined with caladium. Through a cracked lens,
her face is a discolored snowball. A mourner
at her own funeral. Her ankles turned inward.
Fingernails brittle and buried. Beribboned grave.
Cream, mandarin, shamrock. Gauze stuck
to her stitches. Confidence slipped overboard.
She blows her own ashes out to sea.

Nicole Borello was born in Pittsburgh, PA and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area where she still resides. Her first full-length book of poems "So What If I Bleed," was a finalist in both the International Book Awards and the USA "Best Books" Award. Her first chapbook, Fried Fish and Breast Milk will be published in July by Dancing Girl Press.

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