let’s go fly, or adventures in “reparenting”

I’m sure someone has a term for it somewhere, but there has to be a word for treating yourself like the kid you never got to be, for not just getting in touch with your inner child but dropping all that psychobabble and being your inner child for an afternoon, letting that knock-kneed, frizzy-headed gosling I was at ten lead the way. Mostly, this means I pet goats and feed blades of grass to their greedysoft lips through some farmer’s fence, or maybe I imbibe mint-chocolate ice cream before a dinner of canned peas warmed with a little butter and salt (don’t judge—peas are an all-time comfort food for me). Other times, this means I get to things I never did when I was young, which is why I took an afternoon earlier this month to fly a kite. Now, when Jessica learned last year that this simple pleasure was missing from my catalog of childhood memories, she was horrified, and last Christmas, she gifted me this beauty—a bluebird of happiness, parade fangled and bright. We held on to it for all of those cold, hard-working months with no way to get her off the ground until we got here to North Carolina where the wind was Mary-Poppins perfect up on Max Patch, a mountain bald right outside of Hot Springs. It took a few tries, but then suddenly the wind took on flesh, making the string taut, jumping as if there were a fish torquing the line. Jessica bounded across the field with it too, stirring up the curiosity of a dog named Otis who leapt into the air trying to catch this marvel flying so steady in the sky.

It’s official: even though all grown-up, I still run like a girl.

About Nickole

Nickole Brown grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and Deerfield Beach, Florida. Her books include Fanny Says, a collection of poems forthcoming from BOA Editions in 2015; her debut, Sister, a novel-in-poems published by Red Hen Press in 2007; and an anthology, Air Fare, that she co-edited with Judith Taylor. She graduated from The Vermont College of Fine Arts, studied literature at Oxford University as an English Speaking Union Scholar, and was the editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the Kentucky Arts Council. She worked at the independent, literary press, Sarabande Books, for ten years, and she was the National Publicity Consultant for Arktoi Books and the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. She has taught creative writing at the University of Louisville and Bellarmine University. She was an Assistant Professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock for four years. Currently, she is the Editor for the Marie Alexander Series in Prose Poetry at White Pine Press and is on faculty every summer at the Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference and at the low-residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Murray State. She lives with her wife, poet Jessica Jacobs.

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