Origin Stories - Nancy Botkin

Icelandic
by Nancy Botkin

I’m down on my knees
scraping paint off

the floor with my thumbnail,
washing my hands
over and over, but it’s like trying

to get blunt force trauma
and strangulation out of the news.

I went back and forth between Icelandic
and Moonmist,
colors suggesting cool and distant,
colors with blue

undertones. I peer through the vertical slats
at a slab of November sky, dark and bruised,

but what a lovely idea the leaves have of
striking gold,
catching fire,
flaring red.

It makes
cleaning them up less of a chore,
but what do you do with a body?
What to do with a baby

who cries and cries?

Here’s one idea: take her
to the thigh-high weeds
and bury her under an ivory moon,
always so indifferent to bare arms
and the nape of a neck.

One by one, I held square samples
against the wall
which produced a false reading

like a faint pulse
or the moon behind clouds,

and what does a baby girl do in the afterlife?

Here’s one dream:
the dirt takes her apart, takes away
every color that made her human,
but she undoes the gray buttons, the brown
blood fades, and she floats into a room
that holds its champagne promise,

unaffected by morning
light or evening light,
or lamplight,
or candlelight.

Or time.

I’m grounded here for days,
the paint hardening on the brush,

and I hold a swath of sky in my mind,
the pink one, reminding me

of feverish skin, blush,

cooing, and silent laughter.

*Originally published in december and a semi-finalist for the 2022 Jeff Marks Memorial Poetry Prize

Origin Stories – Icelandic

“Icelandic” began to take shape as I was preparing to paint the living room, my hands busy with color strips. Around that time, there was a horrific story in the local news about an 11-month-old girl who was found in a shallow grave, murdered by a man who was caring for her for a couple days. In a fit of rage, he struck her. Panicked, he drove her to an isolated area, but soon broke down and led police to the body. In my mind, I was grappling with dichotomies: the beauty of nature, the horror of nature, the safety of interiors (home and family) but also the breakdown of those institutions. My heart broke for the girl, and I invented a kind of heaven for her at the end of the poem filled with soft colors and peace.

BIO

Nancy Botkin’s The Honeycomb won the 2022 Steel Toe Books chapbook prize and will be published in the Fall of 2023. Her full-length collection, The Next Infinity, was published by Broadstone Books in 2019. She lives in South Bend, Indiana.