Princess Diaries No. 12: Nancy Jean
by Caleb Nichols
All the poets who don’t know it:
my mom, when she said
I found a bee,
dead on the steps, with a full load
of pollen on its legs,
which made it so much
sadder,
or when she told me
that she felt her dad’s death
was the first snag of a sweater
unraveling,
or her glass jars of urchin
shells & sea glass, the ramshackle
precision of their arrangement,
or her
winding conversations with ravens
and crows, & her belief
that this is how
the dead come back
to have a chat,
or how she keeps her pantry
stocked in a way that sings a song
of abundance & comfort in boxes,
cans and tins, tetris’d together
so expertly,
her carefully curated collection
of objects displayed on the beam above the
threshold of the kitchen — kissing dolls from
Chinatown, ceramic salt & pepper shakers,
the tiny wooden house from Germany,
a broken kewpie statuette
glued together, inscribed NICKIE,
the nickname her mom
gave her dad,
all these loose threads
she’s woven back into a weave,
to staunch the creeping dark,
like any poet
does.
Photo credit: Brian Wangenheim
Caleb Nichols
Caleb Nichols (he/they) is a writer from California, occupying Tilhini, the Place of the Full Moon, the unceded territory of the yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini tribe. His poetry has been featured in Hoax, Redivider, DEAR Poetry Journal, & other places & his chapbook Teems///\\\Recedes was published Kelp Books in 2021. He is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at Bangor University in Wales & he is the founder of the SLO Book Bike, a queer-owned, bike-powered, pop-up bookshop in San Luis Obispo, CA.