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Nicole Tallman
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the poet
Nicole Tallman has authored three poetry collections – Something Kindred, Poems for the People and FERSACE – as well as co-writing the forthcoming collaborative work Julie, or Sylvia with Beryl Cooper and Ibrahim Sofiyullaha. A Michigan native, Nicole now lives in Miami, where she's the official Poetry Ambassador for Miami-Dade County. She's also the editor of Redacted Books, and poetry editor of The Miami Native, South Florida Poetry Journal and The Blue Mountain Review.
the poems
Montréal
I book us a room in a hotel named after a famous poet.
It reminds me of an ex I thought I’d forgotten.
It has a balcony that faces the street.
In the morning, the sound of plates wakes us.
You bring me a coffee in bed and an apple.
We watch the city wake up below us.
A man carries a bushel of hyacinth.
A woman cries to someone on the phone.
We dress and go downstairs for breakfast.
I speak French to the hostess and remember
I have another voice.
It’s the one I use when I pretend I’m someone else.
She seats us next to a couple in love.
They drink out of each other’s glasses.
We move to a table closer to the window to forget ourselves.
Tulips
After Sylvia Plath
The tulips are too excitable, it is summer here.
Look how yellow everything is, how loud, how sunned-in.
I am trying peacefulness, lying by the pool quietly
As the light stares at these concrete walls, this float, this face.
I am somebody; I have everything to do with implosions.
I have given my name and my night-clothes up to my work.
Nobody watched me before, but now I am watched and recorded.
The tulips have turned me in, from the window beside me
Where once a day their lens slowly widens and slowly zooms in,
And I see myself, exaggerated in the papers and on the screens
Between the eye of the public and the eyes of the seen,
And I have only a cartoon face, I have effaced my real self.
Before the fame the day was quiet enough,
Then the tulips filled it up like an explosion.
Now the air blares and flares around me the way a trumpet
Blares and flares around its bright-yellow bell like a bee.
Chicago
We spend Christmas in Chicago.
We fly bundled up for a blizzard.
It never snows while we are there.
We take a walk before the sun comes out.
We drink jasmine tea and watch our breath form in the air.
The elms are lonely and naked
without their winter coats.
We head back to bed and watch TV.
Later, we walk to get some ramen from this place
the concierge recommends.
We buy a bottle of our favorite wine to share in the room.
This is the point in our trip when I’m tired of dining out.
I imagine you are back home in our kitchen cooking.
Cutting vegetables with precision. You play jazz.
Why do I always want to be somewhere else?
Publishing credits
Montréal: River Mouth Review (Issue No. 14)
Tulips: Cultural Daily (August 9th 2023)
Chicago: exclusive first publication by iamb
