![](https://swamp-pink.charleston.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Davis-pic.What-do-you-scaled.jpg)
What do you feel in your body when you overplant a friend and it dies?3
Nicelle Davis | Poetry
Mother felt suffocated by the suffix -hood. Carbon Monoxide
took my friend, then my grandparents. Now I’m watching
COPD slowly strangle my father. It’s funny how we under-
value the unsayable. Air, what’s that? My birth sign triple
layered in Venus. The antique lace curtains of my childhood
are soot-stained at their hems—death is playful, touching
toes, fingerprints warning: you should be dead. Forgive me.
I am what I fear.
3Plant Questions (title) by Annette Schiebout
Nicelle Davis is a California poet, collaborator, and performance artist. Her poetry collections include The Walled Wife (Red Hen Press, 2016), In the Circus of You (Rose Metal Press, 2015), Becoming Judas (Red Hen Press, 2013), and Circe (Lowbrow Press, 2011). The Language of Fractions was recently released from Moon Tide Press. Her poetry film collaborations with Cheryl Gross have been shown across the world.