Throwback Thursdays! We’re bringing back some of our favorite pieces from the last 30 years of Scribendi.
[Untitled]
Jeff Nissen- Washington State University – 1991
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could it have been those midnight showers soaping the in-between places
those secret folds and eyelids
wearing an old shower curtain this whole world mapped out across your body
South America covers your crotch like a leaf the Caribbean melts into your hips
Mexico contours your navel
the Midwest stretches deserts across your chest neck arches back into the Arctic
water drips off your ears
your mouth moves into the shower head and steam floats
around your lips in circles
wafer overflows from your lower lip I think you must
be drowning or thinking
about making love, we never could in those late night
showers only after morning came
in through the blinds, the radio blaring static into
our feet twitching into the static
you put coffee on, waking me with the pitter patter
of your feet on the bathroom tile
those times when you would lock the door because you
knew I was listening or pretending
to ignore you was impossible when you would accidentally
leave your jeans unzipped
your skirt slit open at the hip and your eyes would
stare down info that secret glaze
unblinking on the highway we drove over wheat fields
and lost ourselves in the rain
watching you mornings cooking tortillas in the antique
microwave oven somebody died for
when the phone rings we fight and push each other
into the pale man in gray suit
into the mail box the driver’s seat
the check book
the dominant position
nights on the couch with you reading stories pretending
we lived those lives
Catherine/Heathcliff
Isabel/Osmond
Sophi/Nathan
Catherine/Etienne
Edna/Robert
pretending we’d never heard of insurance payments
phone bills, rent, distractions
eating away our lost hours with needles and threatening
to turn the lights out
driving my motorcycle info old town cemeteries comparing
dates and names on gravestones living on pan dulce and dirty wafer winding down mountains on trains which rattled over
our lips would trip over the same sentences mimicking
our desires and concerns
standing behind you in the mirror combing the tangles
from your hair
twisting info each other during cold winter mornings
shaking one another out of dreams
your doe-eyes open on me and a lotus blooms when we
speak of children
Life is hard enough without creating this language
to tear into each other
in jokes and literary levels too deep to bother digging
and untwisting feelings
at sea you’d send me letters with nothing on them but
sketches etched around the tiny places
where your thighs shook into abstract smears hungry
to be understood
knowing that when my hands move around your body into
those secret places
it’s only definitions these hands or these words trying
to explain
The everyday places
we live inside each other
you wouldn’t speak to me driving home on late nights
until I apologized for everything
we didn’t have
much money in those days
when your thighs would shake just talkin’ about fuckin’
and we could not keep our tongues
as quiet as we do now all the early morning showers
standing in the hot water together with our
alarm clock watching bus after bus travel past us
morning after morning hearing the pilfer patter of
feet above us on the next floor. Crows slamming through
the window as each morning we missed the sunrise until
it was May and I had already gone North again.
But in those early days before we began
changing channels on the TV in a malicious way leaving
lights on so there’d be something to talk
and argue about
maybe I locked you out one too many times
or lied on the phone about where you were so late
in my life how come I never stopped speaking to you
in my father’s voice?
Knowing how far it’d gone when you brought home that
damn farm kitten
trying to annihilate those hours when words slit too
deep for simple children’s games
sometimes, after my most gruesome nightmares, I would
only begin screaming after I’d woken up
terrified I might forget how to scare us both.
Remember when I stole that video-camera and spent
my whole life recording every curve
in your body every angle in our apartment every place
I could escape out the window?
I wanted to remember if it had always been like this
and if things always changed
or if God was on amphetamines
and our lives just got put on fast-forward
sometimes we’d even hide books we’d read from each
other afraid one of us might learn too much
about killing in a quiet way
There was this obsession I had with puffing
the sheets back and trying to stare the secrets of
the night before out from inside the mattress but the
first time I was looking for got lost somewhere before
we’d even bought this soiled history writing secrets
about the couple who rented the place the year before
when we were building that bed I taught you the intricacies
of power tools and you showed me
an article about a woman who poured kerosene all over
her lover in bed
somehow we stopped paying attention to exactly which
words chipped away at that triangle
in our stomachs until we had to keep it spinning just
to feel our hands inside each other
each night you would sneak off into the bathroom and
wash your face until it bled
picking hairs out of the brush and counting how much
I’d lost in that days battle
until that day you forced me into the grocery store
pushing the cart down the aisles
past the condoms and diapers screaming:
“This is how much if costs God damn you this is how much
it costs!”