Poetry by Hallie Nowak

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​Lying in the Snow on Rockhill Street

It is winter. In my body,
Christmas lights buzz,

thawing through my liver.
Your string light smile,

your unblinking icy eye--
I bury all of it in the busted brick

on the corner of our apartment
and the two years between us.

I think about the traffic light,
its passionless pulsations

of red, fire, wanting. Its please
slow down whisper-scream

lighting the also red brick
of your body coated with fingers

of frost. Filling my socks with a quiet
indignation, I suspend the moment the white headlight

reflracts against your pupil, Cars halt 
at the end of our street. I buried you 

because I loved you. Dusk scratches its cold
fingers across the sky. I thumb through

your dusty book filled with diagrams
of moth species. My back is scarred pink

with the little lines of your fingernails. A car screeches
against the ice. This street is too slick to drive down.

Tires     gouge                   the quiet place where
I buried  _____. When spring enters 

your unfamiliar body,             the lunar moth
lays its bright eggs     in the frozen 

indentation where                   two bodies

once         frozen together
                 nestled. In my body,
                                               winter warms everything crimson.





Before delicate rosy keloid scars grow over gashes,

you held me hyperventilating on the beige carpet of our apartment.

The blue veins in your wrist spoke to my pulse.
My pulse quieted to irregular palpitations 

that matched your coronary defect
you never treated. Yes, wounds can speak,

as can impressions left in fabric 
and wet stains on pleated skirts.

I thought our stains complimented each other
tenderly. I want to tell you that I am not angry

at your left earring, or your face that looks somehow
less familiar in every picture. I am not resentful

for the nights you coiled up alone on the couch
in the living room. Instead, I remember your loving

fingers rubbing the knots out of my tangled spine.
I think about the way you held me

the night after the night 
after the night I was raped by a friend.

How do I come back from this? I am not sure
I know. However, I am thanking you

back into my birth for you being born as you.
I am not sure I am ready, but eventually I want 

to be split open kindly;
a bleeding receptacle
for forgiveness.  

​

Hallie Nowak is a poet and artist writing and residing in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where she is in pursuit of her undergraduate degree in English at Purdue University Fort Wayne. She is the author of Girlblooded, a poetry chapbook (Dandelion Review, 2018). Her work can also be read in Okay Donkey and Noble/Gas Qrtrly where her poem, “A Dissected Body Speaks,” was awarded runner-up for the 2018 Birdwhistle Prize. Twitter: @heyguysimhallie Instagram: @hallie_nowak

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