Nicelle Davis is a multidisciplinary artist who uses video, poetry, performance, and publication to discuss topics ranging from artistic collaboration, feminist identity, poverty and power, and the environment. Her published books include Circe, becoming judas, In the Circus of You, The Walled Wife, and The Language of Fractions. Her work has been featured in poetry in The Language of Fractions, Moon Tide Press, CA, September 2023, Poetry journals featuring Davis’ work include Broadside, Provence Town, NJ, 2023, Lucky Jefferson, Chicago, Il, 2023, and Rattle, Los Angeles, 2023. Also, several of her poems were published in Beat Not Beat, Moon Tide Press, Los Angeles, 2022.

LOVE AT AGE 4: EXSANGUINATION

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                                                    It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,

                                              And in this flea our two bloods mingled be;

                                                                                              —John Donne

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It’s not the vampires but the diseases they carry;

Lyme for example looks a lot like depression, moving

from the nervous system, to joints, to the heart.

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No tick actively seeks you out. They can go two years

without eating. Reaching up toward the curved universe—

something like a hug. Entomologists call this questing.

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So much of bug language sounds sexual. Engorged

to twice its size. I could see the tick in the arm of my

preschool friend—that and a row of burn marks

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from where his father took a lighter to his kid’s skin.

Home remedy to burn a body out of the body—

he missed and kept missing. His dad had a way of

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growing dark when drinking. There are ways to love

that are larger than sexual. I held my arm to his arm,

hoping the tick would come into me.

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LOVE AT AGE 13: THE MIDDLE SCHOOL SCAB EATER

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Everything about her was recessive: hair retreating into tight curls, arms

holding legs close to chest. She folded into a wooden chair like the yes /

no notes we agonized over; tight origami shapes we passed while Coach

wrote heavy petting on the board. We hated her. Her child’s body and thick

lips. Her shins bleeding where she ripped off scabs.

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Coach going over the concept of foreplay, explained how the family dog never

really loved us—was only after the pleasure of being touched. You have to butter

a lady up was his best attempt at talking about the bodily secretions most of us

were wearing like invisible gloves. She was beautiful and secretly we loved her.

Her obliviousness.

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In class, she blew on her open sores same as the head cheerleader blew on

wet petal-pink nail polish. It was confusing, this separation of love from

pleasure. She looked satised. Harvesting dry red chips, taking herself into

her mouth like bread. She didn’t notice how even Coach gagged a little when

he looked at her. His argument

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for abstinence, a game of averages: If two people sleep with two people who have

slept with two people, then we’ve all slept with your mother and our fathers, we’re all

carrying something catching within us.​​