Nicole Terez
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Nicole Terez was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. Her work has appeared in Can We Have Our Ball Back?, 580 Split, Folio: A Literary Journal, and the Indiana Review. She is a Cave Canem fellow and she currently lives in Boston, Massachusetts.
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Birthday cake
be the prayer bowing the deciduous congregation
into huddled gridlock around us, the only thing holding
against the shatter of crockery hurled. be there
when we are stunned awake by the poison in her command:
to get downstairs. to do it now
in the moments when we stand blinking in the doorway,
Russian matryoshka dolls in matching flannel nightgowns,
while the kitchen behind her bruises with smoke.
be there
when her voice strips gears and becomes shrapnel rising
above the smoke detector's wail. when we do not move
toward the table or the picture window fractured
blind and weeping, when she pries the stove open
and reaches into the black plumes, a vein twisting
its lighting down the wax of her forehead
be there when the sky collapses against shingles,
a drunk's lead weight leaning into its vomit of wet snow,
when the ice encrusted power lines finally break
and darkness enters the room from all sides. when the pan
clatters to the floor and we scatter like marbles. be there,
in that moment, the dream step that finds the floor
disappeared, a black gasp spreading open,
the body made weightless with falling
first down, then away.
