Nancy Miller Gomez

December 7, 2023

“Punishment” by Nancy Miller GomezPosted by

Nancy Miller Gomez

PUNISHMENT

They used books as weapons.
This is not a metaphor.
Because there were no blankets and they were cold,
the men in cell block L threw books
with intent to do bodily harm.
They rained down from above.
Rained down from the cells.
Guards shielded themselves
with dinner trays and mop buckets.
The men tossed entire libraries. A rage of books.
Lobbed in high arcs like footballs,
or pitched overhand like grenades.
Hardcovers shattered on cheekbones
or exploded on the back of someone’s head.
Paperbacks spiraled down, loose pages fluttering.
Thin ones skipped across the shiny tile like stones on water.
There was mayhem. There was blood.
Words littered the floor. Guards ran for their lives.
The men had spent years collecting—
biographies, mysteries, histories, science fiction,
even poetry books, their spines fine and reedy,
or thick with free verse.
One man threw his grandmother’s leather Bible.
Inside the front cover in elegant script
she’d noted the date and time of his birth.
Now it lay face down, back broken.
Another man hurled his family album.
It fell from the third floor, the photos scattering
on impact. His wife, his son, his daughter
smiled up from the chaos.

—from Punishment
Rattle Chapbook Series Selection

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Nancy Miller Gomez: “Poetry helps me to make emotional sense of my life. Each poem is a struggle to clarify something I don’t yet understand.” (web)

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January 26, 2022

“Still” by Nancy Miller GomezPosted by

Nancy Miller Gomez

STILL

The last apple hangs on into winter. 
Drops of rain-sweat slide down its mottled skin, 
catch light from the sun and turn gold. 
Shriveled and brown as a shrunken head, 
it holds onto the branch even while falling
further into itself.

Isn’t persistence beautiful?

The woman who shows up daily
for her dose of methadone.
The man punching the clock shift after shift
though he carries his heart through each day 
in a cold, empty chest. The small boy 
who tries to make sense of the lines 
his teacher has made on the chalkboard.

How do we keep on? 

The bird drops its song, over and over, 
picking it up and dropping it, 
little notes spilling down the mountain.

My father on his deathbed, eyes still filled 
with wonder, he lingers longer and longer
in the spaces between each breath, 
stepping carefully onto the ledge 
of his last thought.

—from Rattle #74, Winter 2021

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Nancy Miller Gomez: “Mostly my poems are collections of things I’ve noticed that circle some central query—in this case, how are we able to persist when life can be so remarkably painful? And yet within that pain we often find the most beauty.” (web)

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January 24, 2022

“How Are We Doing?” by Nancy Miller GomezPosted by

Nancy Miller Gomez

HOW ARE WE DOING?

The man working window eleven 
at the DMV wears his name around his neck 
like a medal won in a war
he never signed up for. Even from here, 

three people back, I can see 
Frank is having a bad day. 
He keeps tapping the same key, hoping
the computer will do something different. 

Poor Frank tapping harder and harder, 
pausing sometimes to stare owl-eyed 
at a young woman waving her paperwork 
as if she’s trying to reignite 

a dying fire. Her pretty face has grown ugly
in her anger. She smacks the counter, demanding 
to know the problem. Roused from a desk,
a grenade-shaped woman drifts over 

to hover above Frank and watch him struggle. 
She gives directions in a tight, managerial voice 
(so unmusical you’d call it noise) while Frank 
continues to tap and tap until finally, 

she commandeers his keyboard, fixes the issue 
and walks off, leaving the stamping 
and stapling to Frank, who hustles 
with a deference that hurts to watch. Meanwhile, 

the man waiting in front of me has fallen 
victim to time and huffed out of the building. 
But Frank, I want to lean over the counter 
into your small, personal space and straighten 

your reading glasses that have gone askew. 
Their broken frames hang cockeyed 
off the thin bridge of your nose like pipe cleaners 
in a preschool project. I want to batten down 

that piece of your hair sticking up. Except 
I’m still in a line that isn’t moving, 
and I fear the office will close
before I’ve had a chance to tell you

how sorry I am that life has brought you here 
to this place where all these people 
unwind like a frayed rope
into the unhappy well of your work days.

But finally, it’s my turn, Frank, 
to look you in the eyes and ask you
to process my papers. How hard is it, really, 
to notice the way you bunch 

one corner of your mouth 
into a half-smile, or blink 
at the mention of your name, 
a name I have carried in my heart 

for all of these twenty minutes.
So when you hand me back 
my temporary license, along with a form 
that asks, How are we doing? 

I want to believe there is someone 
watching over us to whom I can respond, 
Please, we’re not doing well here. 
We have so little

time for kindness. We are lonely 
and hurting. The doors to the building
have been locked. The office is empty.
And night has just begun.

—from Rattle #74, Winter 2021

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Nancy Miller Gomez: “What happens when a poet walks into the DMV? There is no punch line. ‘How Are We Doing?’ reflects my ongoing effort to pay attention to the world and my longing to try and make it a more compassionate place.” (web)

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February 19, 2019

“Growing Apples” by Nancy Miller GomezPosted by

[Video by Blank Verse Films: A Poet’s Space, Episode 2]

__________

Nancy Miller Gomez

GROWING APPLES

There is big excitement in C block today.
On the window sill,
in a plastic ice cream cup
a little plant is growing.
This is all the men want to talk about:
how an apple seed germinated
in a crack of damp concrete;
how they tore open tea bags
to collect the leaves, leached them
in water, then laid the sprout onto the bed
made of Lipton. How this finger of spring
dug one delicate root down
into the dark fannings and now
two small sleeves of green
are pushing out from the emerging tip.
The men are tipsy with this miracle.
Each morning, one by one,
they go to the window and check
the progress of the struggling plant.
All through the day they return
to stand over the seedling
and whisper.

—from Punishment
Rattle Chapbook Series Selection

__________

Nancy Miller Gomez: “Poetry helps me to make emotional sense of my life. Each poem is a struggle to clarify something I don’t yet understand.” (web)

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August 21, 2018

“Invoking the Muse in Cell Block B” by Nancy Miller GomezPosted by

Nancy Miller Gomez

INVOKING THE MUSE IN CELL BLOCK B

There is a heavy sucking
when the door swings open
and a dull clank when it locks.
The men enter the classroom
and open their notebooks.
One taps the table.
One covers his eyes and yawns.
Another gets up and paces
as if he is circling a flight path.
Sometimes it takes a while for the stories
to come out. But then, a mouthful of tacks,
baby shoes, a bat cracked across a small boy’s arm.
They gather these images like kindling
to try to ignite the darkness.
The walls sweat like a submarine.
The air hangs dank and mossy.
There’s an odd Doppler shift of footsteps
as guards come and go, their shapeless voices rising
and falling in the halls. A fluorescent hum glows
off the greenish paint slopped onto cinderblock
so thick it looks like molded cheese.
A man with broken glasses scans the dictionary.
Raven noose, he says, and writes it down.
Ravenous. His neighbor draws crosses
on the palms of his hands.
The alarm blinks its red eye.
What is true about a swastika
etched into a man’s forehead?
Why does it matter if he still dreams
of nights in a cold stairwell,
pallets burning under a bridge,
the sound of his grandmother singing?
They are still waiting in this moonless place.
Children waiting for mothers,
mothers waiting for children
now grown to have children
waiting for them, waiting for wives
or lovers, a visitor, another day. Nothing.
Each scar provides its own dark facts.
What if the thesis is a bottle smashed
on a body? What if the body
can’t grow wings?
The man with the teardrop
tattooed on his cheek
holds the ink tube of a pen
as if it is breathing,
and stares up at a skylight
so dirty it might be night.

—from Punishment
Rattle Chapbook Series Selection

__________

Nancy Miller Gomez: “Poetry helps me to make emotional sense of my life. Each poem is a struggle to clarify something I don’t yet understand.” (web)

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July 5, 2018

“Stand Off” by Nancy Miller GomezPosted by

Nancy Miller Gomez

STAND OFF

There are 14 men in the lunchroom. Some are sitting in chairs, some standing,
some prowling around the edges of the room. They are men who have grown
used to being on a schedule, and this is snack time. They are waiting for a door
to open and a cart to come out. Sometimes it’s oranges, sometimes apples. But today
they have been here too long. Impatience builds like snow before an avalanche.
We want our fruit, they say. But the man watching from the protected enclosure
tells them, You’ve already had your fruit. Eyes narrow, arms cross. No, they say.
We’ve been waiting. And no one has brought the fruit. The man behind glass
repeats into the speaker, You’ve already had your fruit. It was there on the tray.
And now it’s gone. Where’s the tray? the men say. Where’s the fruit? Their hands
fly up in protest like a flock of startled birds. They have NOT had their fruit.
The man in the booth looks at me as if I am the witness who will save him.
Maybe I will say that I too saw the fruit. Only I’ve just arrived. I haven’t seen
anything. I stand there outside the guard station with my backpack filled
with poems watching the men watch me. Is it possible it’s still in the kitchen?
the instructor of the class before mine suggests. She wants these men
to come back to the room where she is teaching them life skills: how to balance
a checkbook, how to find a job, how to be honest in a world that isn’t.
She knows they won’t pay attention until they’ve had their fruit.
Can I just go to the kitchen and look? she asks, and everyone quiets to hear
what the man will say. Then he passes the key through the bulletproof portal.
It scrapes across the metal. She scoops it into her hand and heads to the kitchen.
Everyone waits. Minutes later she re-appears carrying a tray piled with 14 bananas.
The men form a circle around her, each in turn taking one, and then
they are eating and no one talks. Now they aren’t angry men.
They are hungry boys who have just been fed.

—from Punishment
Rattle Chapbook Series Selection

__________

Nancy Miller Gomez: “Poetry helps me to make emotional sense of my life. Each poem is a struggle to clarify something I don’t yet understand.” (web)

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