Christopher Nelson

Two poems from Christopher Nelson’s Windshear

followed by a note on the author

Melancholia

Staring into the orchard for no reason other than
to stare. September light and the detritus
that’s blown in against the ancient pear
that bears hard fruits I feel terrible
about letting rot. Seven years since you let
inside your head the patient bullet.
A detail I come back to: an open book beside you,
two-thirds read, some fantasy—dragons, witchery,
the promise of escape typical of the genre. Earlier this year
I pulled a patch of scarlet gaura, mistaking them
for horseweed. Only one survived: backlit, hundreds
of pink-white blooms small as spiders suspended
on stems thin enough in this late hour to be invisible.
As kids we huffed gas in a meadow from a red tank
woodcutters left behind. When everything shimmered we
ran, but I couldn’t feel my body, my legs
just something churning below me, and me
somewhere far off, watching. The gaura lives one year,
maybe two, a fact that is for some reason
unbearable tonight. We dropped acid and climbed
your roof to watch the stars. We spooked when
you said, They’re watching back. The fantasy
novel, mid-chapter—and the fact that it took
a month for anyone to find you. Folklore says
horse thieves used to rub their hands
with gaura blooms to calm the animals—
come to in the night by unknown men
talking softly and moving slowly, as if yielding to
a caution already renounced.

 

Christopher Nelson

 

Fugitive

The eastern cousin of wild bergamot isn’t
native to our region, but enough have escaped
from gardens to make their presence common,

yellow and purple like the stuffed harlequin clown
of my kindergarten. When as kids we watched
on the copter cam OJ’s white Bronco clear

the interstate, I knew TV would never be
the same. How we touched tongues once
during a sleepover. How your parents

encouraged us to shower together to save water.
How the water when we washed Dad’s Pontiac
for bowling money flushed to the gutter with a

head of foam, but the birds drank it anyway.
When he sold the car and neglected to remove
the plates, the police called at 3 a.m.

because it had been used to rob a pharmacy.
How it’s never fully dark in jail. Always
the permanent fluorescence. Sleeping faces

in “safety light.” I watch my son sleep in the rose
night-light, time already galloping
away with him, a mare capable and opaque,

more machine than promise.
How dry its muzzle. How large the nostrils
that flex and blow.

 

Christopher Nelson

 

Melancholia and Fugitive first appeared in Nelson’s chapbook, Fugitive (New Michigan Press, 2024)

Christopher Nelson is the author of Blood Aria (University of Wisconsin Press, 2021) and five chapbooks, including Blue House, winner of a Poetry Society of America Fellowship. A recipient of the Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship and a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, he is the founding editor of Green Linden Press, a nonprofit publisher dedicated to poetic excellence and reforestation. He has edited two anthologies, Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora, which received a Midwest Book Award, and Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry. Visit christophernelson.info.