A Bodie Miracle

      Digging has a way of making an impression on a young man—
      a little deeper I’d tell myself. A little harder. And
      I’d make it to Miss. Alice.
Some days,

      the air’d get thin, and the ground seem’d a mouth, wet and hungry.
      I’d tell myself not to mind how the rocks felt like teeth closing.
Even after

      the shaft took a chunk outta my knee, I told myself, Miss. Alice
      would love me even with a wobble. So long as we had gold
      enough to get out by winter. But
the winters kept

      lining up, like rows of bite. My knee aching with the chill. I did
      n’t mind her drinking. Not until she drowned herself. Then
      I poured
the whole

      bottle down the shaft to keep the thirst down. The sound of it,
      of nothing filling her, was an endless christening. The earth
      carved to the shape of a
church.

      I realized then that there was no gold in the vein. I realized she
      ain’t dead, just crazy—that she’d not be coming back from
      that darkness, even if I lit the path with fistfuls of stars.
I wished

      that the mine would take me. But the next day they found me,
      caught by a pulley. Dangling by my feet. Ten feet suspended
      under ground. I learned that night, there is a second sky
for the dead,

      with an opening the size of a man—
a place of light.

      A week later the boys brought me a sack of my teeth,
      knocked out in the fall. In my hands the bones flickered
      with the flames of my fireplace—
reflections of a pulse.

      I looked at my empty mouth in the glass and knew I’d keep
      following Miss. Alice like gold, knowing nothing was there.






Click here to listen to Nicelle Christine David reading "A Bodie Miracle"

Nicelle Christine Davis lives in Southern California with her husband James and their son J.J. Her poems are forthcoming in Blue Mesa Review, FuseLit, Illya’s Honey, Moulin, The New York Quarterly, Offending Adam, and Two Review. She’d like to acknowledge her poetry family at the University of California-Riverside and Antelope Valley Community College. She runs a free online poetry workshop at: nicelledavis.wordpress.com/.