Nicky Beer
Associate Editor Caitlin Doyle: In “Metaphor,” just as the poem’s speaker pushes her body to its furthest reaches through intensive exercise, the poet probes the limitations of language. Nicky Beer spurs us to consider how our bodies and our words, depending on how we use them, can act either as barriers to human connection or as conduits for meaningful contact. Yet Beer is careful to register the risks in both ways of engaging with the world. If we “take up the imaginary knife” that lets us sever our boundaries, we may leave marks—some beautiful and some ugly—on ourselves and each other.
To hear Nicky read “Metaphor,” click below:
Metaphor
I put on the harness my trainer hands me. A long, thick strap is attached to the back. He holds the end and pulls against me as I drag him back and forth across the gym. This is what depression feels like, I laugh. He laughs too, but I can tell he isn’t sure if he should. Even though I crack jokes all the time: when crawling along the floor, when slamming the heavy medicine ball against the wall again and again, when my lungs writhe like pinned animals, when my quads turn to gas and float out of the building. I keep pouring water into myself and it keeps leaving me. But let’s not end the poem there. Consider the blessings after great pain that, like lost and lucky travelers, still manage to find their way to us. Hours after the workout, a sensation under my skin creeps in like velvet on fire, like my muscles weeping hot honeyed tea. Let me take a penknife (I don’t own a penknife, but in this poem I do) and make an opening along the outer plane of my thigh, just about the right size into which you might slip your hand so that you might understand a little better. And that you might meet my gaze, and take up the imaginary knife, that I might find my way into you too.
Nicky Beer’s most recent book of poems is The Octopus Game (Carnegie Mellon, 2015). She is an associate professor at the University of Colorado Denver, where she is a poetry editor for Copper Nickel. Recent poems appear in American Poetry Review, Cherry Tree, Poetry, and Tupelo Quarterly.
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