I filled three trashcans, granted the bathroom size, to the brim with crumpled college-ruled cursive, failed attempts at the marriage of language and vision, all the things in my mind I could not put to paper. I couldn’t find the million-dollar words I wanted.

I Google’d the “100 most beautiful words of the English language.”
Efflorescence. I would have liked to use that one. Or maybe petrichor.
Chatoyant.


I tried to give mass to chimeras.
They grew old easily, floating down a temporal lazy river.
Her tissue-paper dreams were torn by the hooks of hometown love.
My metaphors fell flat.

I tried to envision Parnassus, something like rolling hills dotted with vibrant flowers, plants with names I do not know lining the slopes. I am not familiar with Greek foliage. I imagined myself climbing, turning over rocks in search of inspiration.
I found only isopods.

Between 5/4 inch margins I constructed a paper balloon, my papyrus mausoleum. Here is my embalmed work. Blank. Blank. Blank.

Tissue Paper Snowflakes

like tissue paper snowflakes i
break easily
i
get caught up in notions of things like love
and days like tomorrow
and promises like tattoos dyed into the skin of lovers
stuck in memories like first dates and love notes and make up ***.

like tissue paper snowflakes you
are unique
you
are one of a kind.
in kindergarten they told me no two snowflakes are the same
even though probabilistically speaking
you are almost guaranteed to have a twin.

like tissue paper snowflakes you
want to be cold
you
want to be but don’t have the strength.
you could not support the weight
that is frozen water
that is imperviousness to nonphysical things
like longing and sorrow and elation
and things unlike make up ***.

like tissue paper snowflakes i
am deceptively fragile
i tear
from things that are crushing
like dreams
and lies
and arms wrapped tightly.
i weaken from over use,
i ignite from things that overheat
like cigarettes
and us.

like tissue paper snowflakes we
are from one sheet
we
once bled together
our crooked edges match to form
straight lines.
like tissue paper snowflakes we
found beauty in ordinary roots
we
created texture from flatness
and
complexity from things that were not complex
and
like tissue paper snowflakes
we are weakened only by our own accord.

Virginia Nicholson

How To Build A House In N-Dimensions

1. Begin with lines, pencil to paper (if they could exist) drawing graphite arrangements, N-space reduced to one, a structure viewed in slices. Imagine the bathroom off the foyer, the den off the dining room, viewable only as inked lines, dit-dit-dah, a contractor’s Morse Code.

2. Progress to carpet squares, linoleum tiles, the coral paint pairs well with the eggshell trim.  Dit-dah-dit becomes something useful to the non-contractor, “door” or “Master Bedroom” or “x hundred feet of pipe.” Envision the imagined patterns hidden in the bathroom floor, the kitchen hardwood.

3. Move to volumes, solids, conic sections, height. One story, two stories, a basement, an attic?, take advantage of the introduction of 3D. Upgrade the closet to walk-in, needs more carpet squares. A snapshot of a family barbeque, Charlie’s height 1D penciled in to the 3D door, marring 2D eggshell paint.

4. Adding time, the house is built, ages, gets sold to new families with little Charlies of their own, new markings on the cupboard door, 3-foot-2, 3-foot-5, 4-foot-9. Grass fades from Kelly to sand to Kelly, saturation a cosine function with respect to time. The Zoysia starts in one, breaking ground in two, growing in three, a well-manicured 4D experience.

5-11.    Include the things invisible to us, objects on the order of 1 meter, orders of 10E-2 to 10E9 seconds. Five to eleven drip through leaky pipes, seep through porous flooring, get lost in iron-rich soil and oxygenated exhalations. Five to eleven stay hidden, wrapped up in Calabi-Yao manifolds smaller than graphite hills and valleys marking little Charlie’s height, stronger than the 2-by-4s and stone foundation keeping strong in 4D. Five to eleven circulate undetected, seven dimensions shrunk to sub-pinpoint size, keeping seven dimensions of unexplainables covered until their traces are seen in the blades of Zoysia.