Two Minutes of Light

Nancy K. Pearson

In Two Minutes of Light, Nancy K. Pearson writes about a descent into the madness of addiction and suicide attempts, and the foil to self-destruction is art itself — finding small beauty in unlikely places and transforming it into poetry. With stunning imagination, acute mindfulness, spunk, and not an ounce of sentimentality or gratuitousness, Pearson mines her despair for “minutes of light” that provide rungs toward a more livable life. While immersed in the bleak world of psychiatric wards and crack motels, the poet, almost unnervingly, writes about sea grass, milkweed, ghost crabs, and wild lilies in a way that lifts the reader back to a place of connection, like holding hands with a stranger. Pearson’s genius is her ironic voice, the immediacy of her images, and her fearless attitude. What is creativity if not the antidote to destructiveness?

To the High School Prom Queen

There’s just one highway. The wind rears up like a circus beetle.
The setting sun hangs purple tags on the mountains

as if night were for sale too. Las Vegas tilt o’ wheels
its neon legs toward the desert —

humming seamstress of broke down and ritz
tacking embroidery floss and velvet swag on everything.

You are there, in the Women’s Correctional Institute,
sleeping on a cot in a former storage closet.

Miles away, snow wriggles through dune and pine.
Pork chops thaw in my sink; potatoes boil on the stove.

You behind a bar-pull of stars, sky-wandering
and homeless without the concrete hooks of a city.

You on the streets, cash-wadded and meth-loaded.
You, knocking out someone’s teeth.

Dear friend, I have finally stopped trying to kill myself.
Sometimes the light comes in tiny points,

shark-toothed and smaller than stars;
sometimes, it sprays over everything.

Every day my scars shrivel up — lids of rain
in a garbage can. Once I wanted to travel.

Now I’m in love with the way whole Saturdays
weigh on my back with laminate flooring and wood piling.

My girlfriend and I throw chops on the grill,
fat floats above the trees. Shaken,

sometimes the stars, the pine needles spiral gracefully.

Author photograph by Elizabeth Winston

Nancy K. Pearson

​Nancy K. Pearson is the author of the poetry collections The Whole By Contemplation Of a Single Bone (“Poets Out Loud Prize,” Fordham University Press, 2016) and her first collection, Two Minutes of Light. She received her MFA from George Mason University and currently teaches at West Chester University PA, and through “24 Pearl Street,” Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center’s online writing program. Native to Chattanooga, TN, she now lives in the D.C. area. Visit her at nancykpearson.com.