Dave Nielsen was born in Salt Lake City. He played basketball at Westminster College and earned a PhD in English from the University of Cincinnati. His manuscript Unfinished Figures won the 2015 Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry and was published the following year by Lynx House Press. He lives in a run-down shack on Virginia Way.
Works
Ephraim Waffles
Ephraim Waffles
The first part is easy: spread peanut butter
over the waffle—
then sprinkle grated orange
cheese over the top.
If you want to go all the way,
you could do Cheese Whiz.
Then the syrup,
which is a combination
of milk, sugar, butter,
and vanilla, all brought to a simmer.
I can’t tell you the exact ratios.
To be honest,
Grandma Carol might not appreciate me
telling you this much.
Published in The Aurorean.
The Way
The Way
The mountains east of my dad’s hometown
used to feel pretty remote.
We never followed any trails
back then, just rode down
into one alpine bowl and back out again,
along narrow ridges
and across windswept flats,
through thick groves of whispering aspen.
My dad used to say that if we ever got lost
all we had to do
was give the horse some rein
and she’d know the way.
Once a week or so I talk to my dad on the phone.
We’ve come a great distance
since those rides.
I guess I want to say something
dramatic—about the horse inside me
or maybe the horse inside you.
What I want to say is maybe it’s time
to test this theory.
Sleep Tight (Folio)
Sleep Tight (Folio)
After I bought the king-size mattress
and set it up in the bedroom
the kids came in, giddy as on Christmas morning
and began screaming and jumping on it.
They lay down
shoulder to shoulder to see how many
would fit. They did snow angels
with their arms and legs
and played Abominable Snowman
beneath the covers.
“Got yourself a new bed there,”
my father-in-law said, poking
his head in from the hallway.
He’d come over to see, a grim
look on his face, as though
the whole purpose and justification
for the bed was some sick fancy of mine
that involved his daughter.
The neighbors had to come over,
as though at an open house,
laying and bouncing and trying it out, so to speak,
winking at me, cracking
the most obscene jokes. By nightfall
the bed was full of strangers
from further down the street—a mass
of arms and legs that might have been
inspiration for the most grotesque
medieval statue. I could hardly turn
without having to make love to someone
I had never met before. Midnight a swirl
of softly heaving, sleeping humanity.
I stuck my hand through someone’s armpit
and felt my wife’s hand reaching back.
We locked fingers then, holding it
until my entire arm and shoulder fell asleep
and my hand went numb.
“I love you,” I whispered
into the ear that was nearest me,
kissing it goodnight and feeling it twitch
beneath the brush of my whiskers.
Failed Experiment (The Southern Review)
Failed Experiment (The Southern Review)
Better to be a big fish in a little pond,
so he moves into the country
to a town of a few people.
Little does he know they are all of them poets,
that the first has written a biography
of you-know-who, and the second, the definitive analysis
of the most important one since,
and that they all write poems,
beautiful little lyrics
that they paint on their doors and above their closets
and have tattooed across the buttocks—
painfully moving and intense— so that he is, in reality, a very little fish
in an incredibly little pond,
more like plankton, really,
or plankter, to use the singular.
Published in South 85 Journal.
Bibliography
- Unfinished Figures, Lynx House Press, 2016.
