#nicole callihan

[havingapoemwithyou]

the end of the pier by nicole callihan

[honeybeebutch]

The Origin of Birds - Nicole Callihan // Eve - Savana Ogburn // Adam's Ribs - Jensen McRae // Creation of Eve - Lorenzo Maitani // Briar Rose - Debora Greger

[manwalksintobar]

Message shoved into an empty bottle of rosé and tossed into the Hudson on a sad summer night // Nicole Callihan

I drank have drunk have drowned these sorrows these stars the smallest a jillion times the size of me a hundred times the sea

o! I am small and dumb and broken and so very very alive stranger: I hope the same for you

[violettesiren]

For hours, the flowers were enough. Before the flowers, Adam had been enough. Before Adam, just being a rib was enough. Just being inside Adam’s body, near his heart, enough. Enough to be so near his heart, enough to feel that sweet steady rhythm, enough to be a part of something bigger was enough. And before the rib, being clay was enough. And before clay, just being earth was enough. And before earth, being nothing was enough. But then enough was no longer enough. The flowers bowed their heads, as if to say, enough, and so Eve, surrounded by peonies, and alone enough, wished very hard for something, and the wish was enough to make the pinecone grow wings; the wish was enough to point to the sky, say bird, and wait for something to sing.

The Origin of Birds by Nicole Callihan

[ardent-reflections]

"Desire and desire and desire. All of which is to say: When I close my eyes, I am beside you."

From Nicole Callihan's piece, The Multiverse.

[peggy-sue-reads-a-book]

[nsantand]

Nicole Callihan – A origem dos pássaros

Por horas, as flores bastaram.Antes das flores, Adão havia bastado.Antes de Adão, ser apenas uma costela bastava.Estar no corpo de Adão, perto do seu coração, bastava.Bastava estar tão perto do seu coração, bastavasentir aquele ritmo doce e constante, bastavafazer parte de algo maior, bastava.E antes da costela, bastava ser argila.E antes da argila, bastava ser terra.E antes de terra, bastava não…

[rosamundpkes]

And when the sky darkened, again, I thought it was over, but then, you became water. I closed my eyes and lay on top of you, swallowed you, let you swallow me too. — Nicole Callihan (The End of the Pier)

happy birthday @laurabenanti <3

[ashiqui]

for @augustsjanes — loving you is sunlight.

micah nemerever, these violent delights / jeanette winterson, why be happy when you could be normal? / madeline miller, the song of achilles / nicole callihan, the end of the pier / @andatsea (x) / masha raymers (x) / jessie burton, the miniaturist / louise glück, tango / richard siken, scheherazade / iu & suga, eight / yves olade, when rome falls / @nephrosoupp (x) / taylor jenkins reid, the seven husbands of evelyn hugo / e.e. cummings (x) / william shakespeare, romeo & juliet / fall out boy, the last of the real ones / @poemsonmars (x) / zarina situmorang / @promethes (x) / david viscott / seperis, down to agincourt / @titsay (x) / daylily, movements / federico garcia lorca / hozier, sunlight / extraordinary attorney woo, 1x04 / taylor swift, out of the woods / shauna barbosa, cape verdean blues

[jeeyuns]

✍️ The End of the Pier | Nicole Callihan

alternatively: Th: Take my arm. H: You're my tugboat now. - H of H Playbook | Anne Carson

[justforbooks]

Grilled Cheese

On the joy of a small and perfect thing

In writing about the grilled cheese sandwich, I find myself with little to offer but praise. It is difficult to encounter such a thing and not overrun the page with the fervency of my gladness.

This is not a column where I will carp and complain—about air-fryer grilled cheeses, or fancy gourmet grilled cheeses, or Kraft-single grilled cheeses, or the proper application of butter, or the appropriate pan, or the degree and nature of the condiments. To me, each grilled cheese is enough, and more than enough. In this world so full of slaughter and fire, where doubt and monstrosity abound, this much is clear to me: the grilled cheese is a small and perfect thing. And how many of those are there?

So my position on the grilled cheese is unabashedly boosterish, and moreover, it is agnostic towards ingredients and provenance. To your grilled cheese you may add caramelized onions or avocado; bacon, turkey or ham; chutney or cornichons. Make it with Wonderbread or a freshly-baked eighteen-grain country loaf sourced from fields you cultivated yourself in a cantilevered sky-farm with the finest hydroponics. Add goat cheese or smoked gouda or aged cheddar or unidentified plasticine processed cheese product; heat it in a pan or over a flame, under a broiler, in a dutch oven, or with an acetylene torch. I do not care. You have composed something perfect with your own hands. You have made something that will warm and satisfy you. You have, for a small moment, partaken of the act of creation that grants the human animal its sliver of divinity. You have done so by means of the grilled cheese sandwich.

From two perfect things—bread and cheese—arises a more perfect union. In contemplating it and its lessons I think of this fragment from Fernando Pessoa’s “Odes”:

To be great, be whole: nothing that's you Should you exaggerate or exclude. In each thing, be all. Give all you are In the least you ever do. The whole moon, because it rides so high, Is reflected in each pool.

Each grilled cheese sandwich is entirely itself, like the moon is its whole self in a barrel of water. What else could it be? It is enough. To encounter it is to encounter something made for pleasure which gives pleasure in the beholding and in the consuming.

The simplicity of the sandwich engenders its own kind of awe: an internal pause at the perception of this unalloyed good. Describing that complex emotion makes me think of another poem, by Eugenio Montale, about the perfection of lemon trees in bloom:

It is like rain in a troubled breast, sweet as an air that arrives too suddenly and vanishes. A miracle is hushed; all passions are swept aside. Even the poor know that richness, the fragrance of the lemon trees.

You can be too poor or too ill or too overwhelmed to obtain a grilled cheese sandwich, but the thought of one is attainable to anyone; the ideal is there, pleasant to the mind parched of gladness.

I imagine a wheel on which I am turning dizzily and perpetually on the verge of falling off, and then I think of the small and simple and perfect thing, and the wheel judders to a halt and I am blessed with stillness. Joy changes you, it smashes the dark wheel: considering the grilled cheese sandwich I am as Nicole Callihan writes all moonshine on the snowbank, clockwise back to a better self. This thing is humble, not hallowed; it provides not ecstasy, but satisfaction, which is easier to obtain and less giddy to receive. You can hold it in the palm of your hand and be content.

Consider this: each grilled cheese sandwich is a reflection of all other grilled cheese sandwiches that have come before it. All are part of a great whole that rings the world in fat and starchy warmth. Each grilled cheese sandwich bears commonality with each other grilled cheese, in all their guises; it is easy to get wrapped up in the particularities, the innumerable recipes, easy to cavil and quibble and doubt, but perhaps better, and certainly more gentle, to regard the grilled cheese sandwich as an ideal, a thing-in-itself. Faced with this perfect thing, the idea of the small good whole, I am pleased and undone at once.

I am hungry for joy lately. Perhaps you are too. The grilled cheese sandwich for me is an object of consistent joy, which is different in kind than the transcendent ray-through-the-clouds joy that graces any life too rarely. Perhaps that makes it more valuable; reliable pleasure, ordinary pleasure, is as common as light and as necessary. It is only in the consideration of it that I come to appreciate how this mundane thing can be an object of desire and delight. With effort and after much contemplation I think myself toward joy, and welcome its arrival. Life must be leavened by joy to rise; stand and let it in; it approaches with soft footfalls and is easy to miss, or to begrudge in petulance or fervor.

Denise Levertov, too, writes about the pleasure that arrives through effort:

I like to find what's not found at once, but lies

within something of another nature, in repose, distinct. Gull feathers of glass, hidden

in white pulp: the bones of squid which I pull out and lay blade by blade on the draining board—

tapered as if for swiftness, to pierce the heart, but fragile, substance belying design. Or a fruit, mamey,

cased in rough brown peel, the flesh rose-amber, and the seed: the seed a stone of wood, carved and

polished, walnut-colored, formed like a brazilnut, but large, large enough to fill the hungry palm of a hand.

I like the juicy stem of grass that grows within the coarser leaf folded round, and the butteryellow glow in the narrow flute from which the morning-glory opens blue and cool on a hot morning.

Still, life can’t all be squid bone and glass-feathers; some pleasures must be simple. As I ponder joy I long for it and for ease; for senses immured in pleasure, for a mind upturned by wonder, for the small good moment prolonged forever.

It is, on the whole, a good thing that our senses are dulled and subsumed by care. Should we stop and observe each perfect thing—the vast, for example, fireworks of dying the trees are now engaged in, as they are each autumn; the coarse grass-stems on the brown ground; the silky peel of an apple; the way cold water feels on the tongue—if we were to feel them completely, we would have no time for any of the rest of it. We would bathe in wonder and cease there, in the pathless woods of pleasure. Nothing would get done and no one would get born; we would be lost in admiration. I can think of worse ends but admit the inefficiency of astonishment. Still I think there could be more room for it. More joy.

Every joy erodes; survival necessitates that no state be fixed. But we can hope for its return, as light returns. I hope you find your small perfect thing, and in doing so welcome joy’s arrival. I recommend going to your kitchen and finding a loaf of bread, and adding to it cheese, and adding to that heat, and from this meeting of good things, attaining a moment of satisfaction to which you may return at any time. Toward that benediction I end this column with a return, to the poem of Montale and his lemon trees, and its magnificent ending, in which the sun pours forth in gladness; may you too be gladdened; there are still small perfect things in this bad world, grilled cheese, and lemon trees.

The illusion wanes, and in time we return to our noisy cities where the blue appears only in fragments high up among the towering shapes. Then rain leaching the earth. Tedious, winter burdens the roofs, and light is a miser, the soul bitter. Yet, one day through an open gate, among the green luxuriance of a yard, the yellow lemons fire and the heart melts, and golden songs pour into the breast from the raised cornets of the sun.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[havingapoemwithyou]

the origin of birds by Nicole Callihan

[the-star-rigel]

HOPE IS THE THING WITH FEATHERS.

dc comics’ Superman / Netflix’s Shadow and Bones (Six of Crows) / Canary in the Coal Mine, the Crane Wives / Star Wars: A New Hope (the Millenium Falcon) / Bird Song, Florence + The Machine / Marvel Comics’ Phoenix (Hope Summers) / dc comics’ Robins / The Hunger Games: Catching Fire / Blackbird, The Beatles + dc comics / Avatar: The Last Airbender / For Example, Mary Oliver / dc comics / Lord of the Rings: Return of the King / The Hunger Games / The Origin of Birds, Nicole Callihan / Man of Steel / THE TREES WITNESS EVERYTHING, Victoria Chang / Emily Dickinson

[manwalksintobar]

More Like Wings // Nicole Callihan

It wasn't an illness as much as it was a grouping of blackbirds on a telephone wire, or at least that's what the doctor said. She asked me to stick my tongue out farther. She said, this is a pale tongue, indicating your poor diet. She asked me what I had been feeding myself, if I ate crows, etc. I told her about the handful of almonds, the coffee. She asked me to lift up my arms. Like this? I asked. No, she said. More like wings. I made my arms into wings. Also, I scratched at my scalp. She explained this was a consequence of being around children too much and too often. They are dirty, she said. But I love my children, I told her. I am not here to talk about love, she said. While my arms were out it occurred to me that I missed the physical world, that if I were to rid myself of anything, I did not want to drag it and drop it into some "pretend" trash can, I wanted to burn it, or shred it, or fashion it into huge paper wings, hurl it off a very high building, and see if it could fly. You can put your arms down, the doctor said. But I couldn't. I could only lower them a tiny bit, then lift, then lower, and lift and lower. In this way, I experienced flight for the first time. I found my kin along the telephone wire. From my throat, I released one final call, but the doctor, having perhaps been distracted by her own longings, had already dismissed herself from our virtual appointment.

[rosesarereds-posts]

LYRIC ESSAY:

“SPIRAL” BY NICOLE CALLIHAN

Notice how this gorgeous essay evolves down the spine of its central theme: the sleepless swallows. The narrator records her thoughts about the passage of time, her breast examination, her family and childhood, and the other thoughts that arise in her mind as she compares them, again and again, to the mysterious swallows who fly without sleep. This piece demonstrates how lyric essays can encompass a wide array of ideas and threads, creating a kaleidoscope of language for the reader to peer into, come away with something, peer into again, and always see something different.

A Lyric essay is a type of creative nonfiction that blends the boundaries Between poetry and prose . It is Characterized by the poetic style of Writing that often uses Imagery, Figurative Language and Rhythmic patterns to convey meaning.

The focus of lyric essay is often on the Author's emotional or personal Experiences , rather than object facts. They Explore themes of loss, identity, memory And relationships. Is distinct from traditional essay in that it can be Fragmented, Non- linear and experiment with form. It is often structured into smaller sections of fragments each with Its own poetic qualities. As such, the lyric essay presents a unique opportunity for Creative expression in the genre of nonfiction.

[hyejungkook]

Another belated publication update: my poem "At The Light" was the feature on SWWIM Every Day on April 19, 2024. I’m deeply grateful to the ever luminous Kai Coggin for inviting me to send work to SWWIM, an organization I’ve long admired, ever since seeing Naoko Fujimoto do a Zoom reading during the early part of the pandemic. Thanks to everyone at SWWIM for the beautiful work that you do!

“At the Light” emerged from a prompt at a panel on creating and nurturing virtual spaces last fall at the 2023 C.D. Wright Women Writers Conference. What I recall from the prompt: a prose poem, written in present tense, with the first and last phrase being the same, and the poem being comprised of a list of excuses. Nicole Callihan, Kai Coggin, Caitlin McDonnell, Iris Jamahl Dunkle, and Sara Wallace were the generous and inspiring panelists.

Thank you for reading and also listening—there’s also a link to my reading the poem!