Muriel Nelson
Like Plugging into the Cosmos
Amity Gaige, "Sea Wife"
Be still, stage fright, you're not important.
And you, hear the music's pulse, not yours.
Take a breath deeper than your shaking.
Take another. Fill your lungs
and swim into waves composed long ago,
their sinewy shapes flexing
beneath you, extending
all around you, foaming in
and spreading out still.
The word like has no place here. Now
you with your electric nerves are
Beethoven's Götterfunken,
Dickinson's Alive,
Marsalis' Afterglow.
Bio
Muriel Nelson's publications include two poetry collections, Sightsinger (Encircle Publications) and Part Song (Bear Star Press, Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize), and two chapbooks, Please Hold (Encircle Publications, Poetry Chapbook Award) and Most Wanted (ByLine Press, ByLine Chapbook Award). These and three book manuscripts were shortlisted in four national contests and finalists in seventeen. Nominated five times for the Pushcart Prize, Nelson's poems have appeared in Guesthouse, Hayden's Ferry Review, Hunger Mountain, New American Writing, Painted Bride Quarterly, Ploughshares, Triggerfish, and other journals as well as in several anthologies. Two of her poems have been set to music. She holds master's degrees from the University of Illinois School of Music and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.