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Three nightmares and two scenes from life

 

 

1.  Theater of cruelty

 

 

High in the lifeguard chair the director grows precariously tall,

shouting through his megaphone—

 

it’s you. We’re playing Hamlet in an Olympic swimming pool

without an audience.

 

Mattresses float, roped together in the foreground

(someone pretends to sleep)

 

an alarm clock hammers into bells; the narrator springs forward

like a sprung trap—it’s me,

 

on one of the mattress rafts, ready to set the scene

for tragedy, my parts

 

in this one even rhyme (someone floating face-down

in the background)

 

and you above us resetting the clock over and over

because you can.

 

 

 

 

2.  That one summer

 

 

we stayed up late talking stars, you and me

and the astronomer

 

those nights you slept in the living room

She was young

 

everything impressed her equally

(especially you)

 

she didn’t know that you were laughing at her

Midwestern ideas

 

My room was inside your room so you said

isn’t it time

 

for you to go to bed?  I thought past time

put some music on and

 

couldn’t tell if the walls of my room

were shrinking

 

towards me or filling with water or filling

with dirt

 

 

 

 

3.  The typewriter

 

 

After sex (terrible even in dreams) I went looking for your typewriter

in the closet

 

which was long like the old cloakrooms in elementary school

30 hooks lined up

 

at reach-for level on the wall and kids lined up (either alphabetically or

according to height)

 

to be counted before lunch. When my mother went to college

freshmen girls still lined up

 

naked and posed for posture-checking photographs during orientation

like Tereza’s nightmare.

 

Your dorm room was an open field (with a mattress on the floor somewhere)

and in the closet

 

there weren’t so many hooks but there were boxes to look inside of

and two typewriters.

 

Half naked, stooped over, searching, I found the broken

one first, had to find

 

the good one before you got out of the shower. I said you smell good. 

You caught me—balanced

 

something heavy on my back. I turned, it fell and you were yelling

how could you be so stupid

 

to think I wanted you and other words, too,

but everything was these words.

 

 

 

 

4.  Hotel

 

 

We had to share our room with thirty other women

you’d been sleeping with

 

not a room, really, but a kind of suite crammed full

with rundown furniture

 

The women wandering half-dressed between the beds

and rooms were difficult

 

to count and their faces could change like television channels

change constantly

 

filling the room with a strange unsteady glow and laughter, too

hidden in every corner

 

 

 

 

5.  The joke

 

 

At least once you came to me at night

in the body

 

of someone I loved more recently

or not yet,

 

but I wasn’t fooled, wasn’t surprised.

Your changes

 

don’t surprise me. In your room

you nailed up

 

one blank white mask that shook

its head no

 

when the fan was on.




Elizabeth Gross