Poetry by Nikki Caffier Smith

                      lauren rushing CC




remember the time I found my neighbor’s severed toe in our shared driveway?
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it was, like, one year and change after my dad died
and one year and change before my mom’s boyfriend sexually abused me
the lawn mower sliced it off and spit it out
then the ambulance parked over it
as ambulances apparently do
so I didn’t find it until later that day
when I was walking down the drive to get the mail
and the tar had melted onto it a little and I brushed off the ants
because for some reason I thought it was still salvageable

but that day I was a little unsympathetic
because I remember thinking what a wimp when he screamed
from the ground about his toe having been chopped off
and the blood was seeping through the dish rag someone brought over
and he said he was feeling too weak to apply pressure
so his (now ex-)wife had to do it

this was a couple years before he called my mother in the middle of the night
when he saw me standing on the edge of my roof
this was a few years before I decided he was probably a pedophile
who had abused his step daughters (hence the divorce)
but back then I thought a lot of men were pedophiles…………and I was usually right.

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I Think I have a Poor Sense of Humor


And I’m trying very hard
Not to let this laughter
Rattle my skeleton
Ha!   Ha! Ha!
I said to you once
“Laughing at myself is like laughing into a vacuum.”
Ha haaaaaa……………………………………………….

I heard a child in a fast food restaurant say
That he didn’t want to get more dead
And neither do I
When I look back on my life
I see that I started getting dead
Around the age of three
In the bathtub where
I can only see myself and someone else from above

When I look back on my life 
It is a pretty picture with the eyes scratched out
By several fingernails

By the way
This laughter is still clanging up and down my skeleton
Like a marble in a bathtub pipe
In the pipe of my throat
It sits somewhere in the seat of my chest
And swings its mallet, Jack-Torrance-style, against
The industrial-sized freezer of my heart

Laughter makes me get smushed by anvils
It makes me chase not one but two roadrunners
While anvils crush me along the way

I’m laughing as I write this poem and
It’s hilarious
It’s hilarious how poor my sense of humor is.
A man who knew me when I was a little kid almost died
In a motorcycle accident
And I laughed so hard my insides hurt
Trust me, you’d laugh too if you knew what he did to me
Because context is everything
I’m giggling like a kid in a church trying to be quiet
And failing miserably
I’m the kind of person who chuckles in their sleep
And wakes up with their memory wiped clean
I’m the kind of person who would drop
Absurdist and meaningless punchlines on a crowd of strangers and
Feel very bad about the ensuing silence
But I’m just trying to be happy here
I’m just trying to relieve some tension
And emotional baggage
I’m just trying to make my life as spa-forward as possible
These cucumbers on my eyes are beginning to
Feel more and more like coins
But I aim to relax as much as I can
If I try hard enough
Maybe I’ll die smiling.

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Nikki Caffier Smith is a writer based in Brooklyn. Her writing has appeared in Typishly, Awakened Voices Magazine, and is forthcoming on Kaleidocast Podcast. She lives with her partner and their two ill-behaved cats.

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