The Tick Before
Before you were a fat brown tick
darkening my doorstep
You were a sad girl in a braid, in a picture
Looking out the frame for someone who would help
But no one came. Then you had me.
Others might say you are being cruel
But mom, I doubt that even Others, even you
could have predicted what I call you in this poem.
My weak excuse:
I can’t help how you seemed.
You liked to say, “I have The Lyme,” a joke on your own English,
on doctors’ seriousness. I know just how you got it:
carelessness, walking ahead of us in the tall grass,
your calves I envied tan and bare.
“She never pays attention to her health,”
Your mother said, with rare appreciation.
At my door, you looked off to the side in brown sunglasses,
Rang the bell until it was unplugged
(The passive tense here rolls its eyes—yes, of course, by me)
You got back in the car and wrote a letter:
“Good to see you, even briefly, I’d just needed somewhere I could pee.”
You threw the greatest parties at sixteen:
One thing to be invited, but you threw
(My own lack of going, throwing disappointed you.)
There are no pictures from that time: you’d gained some weight
And so your father didn’t bother.
You cleaned the house from top to bottom
every day before your parents came from work.
You’d sometimes put on music, and you’d dance
One time, the architects across the way
held up a finely lettered sign: “And now perhaps the bra comes off?”
You were so happy when you told this story
And the one about your phys-cultura teacher
who said you ran just like a sack of shit.
A few years later, guess who shows up in the figure drawing class
you’d gotten special leave to audit, due to talent?
He’d been fired, was an artist’s model now.
You drew his belly and what I imagine
was his very little thing. I wrote this poem.
Mini-interview with Nadia Kalman
HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as a writer (or continues to)?
NK: In college, I asked a decisive friend whether I should focus on poetry or fiction. “Fiction,” she said, “It pays more.” She went on to work for hedge funds and I eventually ended up writing both (neither pays.)
HFR: What are you reading?
NK: Ivan Turgenev’s Nest of the Gentry and Naomi Novik’s A Deadly Education. And re-reading, sort of compulsively, passages from Sylvia Plath’s poem “Tulips.”
HFR: Can you tell us what prompted “The Tick Before”?
NK: I was trying to use the metaphor that first and most persistently came to mind, without too much self-judgement (although there is definitely some.)
HFR: What’s next? What are you working on?
NK: Two weird novels.
HFR: Take the floor. Be political. Be fanatical. Be anything. What do you want to share?
NK: If you’re wondering about politics, my suggestion would be, “Do something. Do something now!”
Nadia Kalman is an NEA Literature grantee who has published one novel (The Cosmopolitans, Livingston Press) and translated work from the poet Regina Derieva for the collection Earthly Lexicon (Marick Press.) Several of her poems are also forthcoming in the Chiron Review.
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Heavy Feather Review 