Nicole McCarthy's View of Space (The Tattooed Poets Project)

Our next tattooed poet is Nicole McCarthy, who sent us this photo:

Nicole explains:

"This tattoo came about from a night spent at the top of a crater on Maui. I had been peering into a telescope all night, spotting globular clusters and the rings around Saturn, when our guide asked us to look up. And there it was: part of the Milky Way rising over us. I felt so cosmically insignificant and it was such a beautiful feeling. It reminds me that nothing truly matters, so my writing and my art will always be what I want it to be, not something dictated by others. I got the Earth's moon and a collection of abstract nebulas tattooed on my shoulder 3 years later.

The artist for this tattoo is Sara Kay (@thesarakay) who owns her own shop called Parlour in Seattle."

You should definitely check out Sara Kay's Instagram and see more of her amazing work.

Nicole sent us this poem:

do you ever imagine your life as a peach?


the anticipation of fingers grazing the skin
someone to nuzzle softness
smell the delectable potential
and pluck you straight from the tree
with a palpable hunger
juices dripping down their chin
emboldening their tongue into action
a gesture of consumption
leaving their lips sugared & fingers sticky

i think about that peach
that was plucked
when ripe
and left
without being bitten
on the fencepost
in an august heat.

~ ~ ~

Nicole McCarthy earned her MFA from the University of Washington. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Offing, Redivider, Glass: a Journal of Poetry, The Shallow Ends, Dream Pop Press, Crab Fat Magazine, Ghost Proposal, Tinderbox Poetry, The Fem, Memoir Mixtapes, Civil Coping Mechanism's A Shadow Map anthology, FIVE:2:ONE Magazine,and the 2018 Best American Experimental Writing anthology from Wesleyan University Press. Her work has also been performed and encountered as projection installation pieces throughout Tacoma and Seattle and her written work can be found at nicolemccarthypoet.com. She is a 2018 Artist Trust GAP grant recipient.

Thanks to Nicole for sharing her cool tattoo and lovely poem with us here on the Tattooed Poets Project on Tattoosday!

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