CW: sexual harassment, chronic/potentially fatal illness, and pornography/pin-up girl culture
Jellyfish
After the really dirty and exhausting parts
of the day, after cleaning up dog poop and
walking a pair of pit bulls who have been known
to chomp at ankles, I fold periwinkle blue and
lime green towels, pockmarked with bleach stains,
in endless succession. We need hundreds
of them to fill up the cages. One for each cat,
five or six for a large dog. I am folding them
while listening to Tori Amos on the cd player
when you ooze into the room. All beer belly
and bad attitude, you eat hot sauce on everything,
and ask things like: Since you’re bisexual, do you
just have threesomes all the time? And: When you fuck
another girl, which one of you gets the dildo inside them?
But today, I am not so lucky. Today, as I fold
towels, you edge slowly closer to me, and say:
I hear you’ve been talking about sexual harassment.
I’m going to show you a thing or two that’s sexual.
You back me into the washing machine, your gut
against my hips. I flinch into silence.
That’s right, you say, I’ll lock you in the cage with them
angry pit bulls. Don’t think for a second I won’t do it.
I ride it out like you’re a brutal wave caught on
the rocks of the Cape Breton cliffs where I spent
the storm-scattered summers of my childhood.
I remember the water used to look like steel tipped
with cloud-froth. My sister and I would dance
like sirens in the waves, moving our hips
along to the beat of Madonna. We held
jellyfish in the poreless palms of our hands
because they could not sting you.
Fern, Essentially
Blink, and I’m an adult, discussing the price
of asparagus over cream-sharp Indian take-out.
My mom, infinitely able to make things more
beautiful (who do you think accidentally spilled
the entire damn glitter shaker into my soul-soup?) says:
asparagus, unchecked, left to grow, essentially turns into fern.
I picture a verdant web of vegetables turned
fern finery, wonder if it could crawl up walls
the way my mother’s autumn fern clung to recycled red
and black brick. Twisted for a moment in childhood
reverie, I cannot stop smiling, except then my father
announces he may be dying soon. And I do.
Writing My Will Without You
On our first date, we each found one thrift-store miracle.
We clutched clammy hands, darting across the streets
of Southeast Portland. The sidewalk flung before us,
sun-speckled like a freckled arm. Rummaging through dusty
rows of dresses, a vision in vintage whispered to each of us.
Yours: A skirt made entirely of blue, teal, and purple
neckties. Handmade, no tag. Stitching delicate
as cursive handwriting. Wearing it, you shimmered
like some sort of post-modern mermaid. Necktie scaled.
Mine: A fitted black glove of a dress that exploded below
the knees. Layer upon layer of slowly brightening pink.
Every single pinup girl curve kissed close, then a cotton candy
eruption fluttering around the calves. I felt like Marilyn.
This is the day I think of most often, on nights I can’t
help but remember you. When you first left, I began
to wonder if I was made of icicles. Shivering under comforter,
that whole first month apart. Chapped lips, soundless sobs.
How strange that you don’t know about this new disease, or
that it could kill me. We once went to the same doctors, took
the same pills. For so long, you scooped the very marrow from me.
Now, portioning out my belongings, each pillow or end table contains
some slivering of soul, yet you are not named among the thirty-six.
You, who used to send me daily selfies. Lips puckered
and glossed. Sprays of rainbow eyeshadow. Hair, a peacock
pompadour. I can’t bring myself to delete your photos entirely,
so my phone still plays tricks on me. Phone haunts me,
phone decides your face, split open with laughter,
will be the photograph of the day. You leapt onto
my screen the other night, twenty-three and incandescent,
the purple-teal skirt made of ties kissing your bony hips.
Suddenly, I needed a word much bigger than nostalgia.
I needed to relive that Portland moment so badly,
the blood in my veins began rushing backwards.
My bones turned into numinous clockwork, nudging
us back to the year 2004. And there, I loved you.
Reckless, foolhardy. I loved you all over again.
Freeze Frame
“I don’t know how long regret existed
before humans stuck a word on it.”
-Jeffrey McDaniel
The edges of the photograph curl,
smooth surface worn from sixteen years
of finger strokes, sticky palm prints of desire.
Gloss flattened, reds and blacks no longer
richly saturated, whites gone ghostly grey.
I run my index finger along the penciled arch
of your raven eyebrow and down your cheek,
willing your smile to leap alive.
That summer, we spent hundreds of hours vamping
for my camera. We tied candy ropes around
each other’s carousel curves, then chewed
them off. Your glow-in-the-dark skin draped
across the pale of my porcelain. Your clitoris
blooming, a wild iris beneath my tongue.
I kept the lens of my beat-up Canon eternally
on macro, shooting close-up after close-up.
White wall, black amp. White guitar, electric.
Slicking the pout of your lips glossy red,
I squeezed a few more scatters of scarlet
into the black and white worlds we created.
A waxy apple, a tiny bottle of crimson rum.
I fell in love with you through a viewfinder,
watching as you devoured a raspberry donut,
or blew a kiss. I fell in love with you
as we fucked from every angle we considered
camera-worthy, then pressed our bodies together
in ravenous slow motion, once the camera was off.
In my basement darkroom, you slid your hands
around my waist from behind. We watched
as paper dipped down into developer, and found life.
The red safelight illuminated the hollows in your
cheekbones. Made your skin pulse and shimmer.
When three a.m. came, I snuck back up
to my boyfriend’s first-floor bedroom.
Every night I watched as the cracks in the ceiling
resolved into Brontosaurus, vole, Little Dipper,
wondering what you were doing one
floor beneath. Every night I slept in fits,
thin cotton sheets tangled at ankles by morning.
A trail of lurid red roses curled
their way down the ancient staircase carpet
that led back to my basement bedroom.
That summer in Portland, we made an island
of that dusty basement, with its peeling
blue and green walls, its glossy black floor,
its ten dollar thrift store mattress.
We hung dozens of still-dripping portraits
on wires strung from cobwebbed corner
to corner. It was past midnight, a June Sunday,
when you pointed to my favorite snapshot of you,
said: I’m beautiful there. You make me beautiful.
Sixteen years later,
this single photograph is wasp
in mind’s amber, even when I’m not
pressing palms to it. I wish I could reach
through the image, and pull you
back to me. Wish I could undo
the noise of all the years that came between us,
and freeze frame us in that single photograph.
You, neck tipped back until it appears
impossibly long. Left eyebrow arched,
cinnamon stick eyes tunneling into mine.
The incandescent swell of the moment
spooling open between us.
Our lips about to meet.
Chestnut Oak
This particular and glorious tree is found on the
campus of Sheppard Pratt Psychiatric Hospital;
the largest free-standing psychiatric hospital
in the United States; founded 1853.
(1.)
Zelda Fitzgerald once stayed here, only later
to perish in a fire at another hospital. Awaiting
electroconvulsive therapy, flames shot through
the dumbwaiter, clever and cruel, chewing into one
room after another. Even the fire escapes were wooden.
Crumbling to ash between clutching fingers of nine women
who died that night. I try not to linger on this. I like
to picture Zelda lounging under the shade of my favorite
tree on campus. Sipping lemonade, or tossing back vodka
from a flask she snuck in strapped to thin thigh. I picture
her decked out in satin and jewel tones, sprawled beneath
the enormous chestnut oak. Grey branches clustering,
then shooting skyward, a sparkler’s silvered spray.
(2.)
The pandemic begins. My therapist and I meet outside,
six feet apart on the picnic bench beneath the chestnut oak.
Humid swell of masks bubbled around mouths. The shade
of the tree cools us even in ninety-nine-degree weather. We talk
about my father’s mortality, my mother’s anxiety, the man who
caved in my egg-fragile abdomen with his fist. My therapist wears
over-starched, bleach-white button-downs, and insects crawl all
over him. One week, a small brown spider. The next, a ladybug.
He smiles, That’s luckier. Lets it race across his open palm.
(3.)
Legs vised tight, I sit under the chestnut oak with my fiancé,
sit at cliff’s edge of losing him. His cello-low voice dips even
deeper than usual. He’s drinking again. Has to leave Baltimore
for rehab. A psychiatric hospital romance— deemed doomed
to fail. We made it two years, made it all the way to matching
white gold rings, dreams of tulle gowns and blue plaid suits.
I loved him so much, I was willing to have a giant Catholic wedding.
But the pull of clinking wine bottles and furtive bathroom cocaine
won out over our love. Our initials, carved into the chestnut oak,
bear witness to the hospital’s rush and tumble. J.M. + R.K.
in rough-hewn heart. Our love lingering in grey bark.
(4.)
I swore I’d only allow myself to be admitted here again
when my mother died, but nobody saw this zebra of a disease,
this twenty-seven in a billion coming. Hospitalized again, Zelda
hangs heavy on my mind. How often F. Scott Fitzgerald was cruel
to her. How she danced and danced. Cried and cried. The impossible
horror of dying by fire, alone, just forty-seven. Forty-one myself,
I walk toward the chestnut oak. I forgot the slope of broken concrete,
bursting with slippery grass, and strapped on four-inch platforms.
Glitter-pink, foolish. Outside only thirty seconds, I fall— computer
screaming through air, books tumbling through grass, knees scraped
meat-raw. I begin to weep. Instantaneous. Is this what it means to be
here this time? Must I learn how to pick myself up all over again?