Jessica Purdy
My mother taught me to love my body
by showing me how she didn’t love her own. Grabbing her thighs, she’d shake them and squeeze until the cellulite dimpled. She hated her stomach which I’d only ever seen after she’d given birth to two babies, and would grab it like the shoulders of someone who wouldn’t listen to her demands. I grew to love boys who gave me red roses, and when I was about to marry someone who didn’t, I left him before the ceremony. I moved to the city and became a detective. I spent my evenings picking gum out of my shoes. Interviews with suspects became like first dates. Each one I dissected, looking for truth. Picture the stark concrete room. Metal table, but with a cloth over it. A lit candle and vase of supermarket flowers. Who loves you? I’d ask. And does that person love themself? Over and over I ask. Even in my dreams I ask. In the asking I’d fill with helium and float over the precinct. Over the bodies of victims, as if that could help me see the lies. Could lies be landmarks with arrows? Murderers’ signatures written on the skins? What if I’d gone in the original direction? The tears staining my wedding dress evaporated. Each time I loved myself, I allowed it to take root. Like in early summer, how I’d rip open the thin skin of nursery pots to reveal the roots’ shiny white threads before plunging the tender seedlings into holes. No thought of how, far into the future, I’d be pruning and displaying cut blossoms.
My daughter writes a story about me after I’m dead
In it, her father and I have a great love. Even our bathroom sink grows soft as baby rabbit fur. Vines invade our empty bedroom. She doesn’t know we invited their greenery in when there was too much space between us. In her story there is no darkness or doubt. Though she notices our wedding photo tilts every time the train goes by. Twice a day, the beach we stand on in our finery becomes a new landscape. Once, it transformed into the rim of a volcano we’d never visited. She writes how the photo shows us in a panda enclosure. The pandas are doing somersaults around us. We remain as fixed as plastic. Me in white lace and he in a black suit with a blue ascot. Our closet never revealed the secreted gun. I never left a note.
Ghost Horses of Nevertouch Pond
In the dream I’m sleeping beside my husband’s coffin. The coffin is splintered and brown like a vampire’s. His bones rattle inside it when I twist on the mattress. There is nothing strange in this. It’s four in the morning in my childhood house behind Central Cemetery on Nevertouch Pond. I go out to the dock to continue painting. The sun isn’t up but I can feel it coming. The trees glow pink in the muggy silence. The pond drops into myth. Its depth is legendary and unknown. The paint on the railing peels and I scrape. The tool’s metal edge lifts the faded chips. My hand is satisfied. The old paint sticks to the sweat on my skin. The new paint is ultramarine. Lapis lazuli of Mary’s robes, blue of the headscarf worn by the girl with the pearl earring, blue of sky in the museum paintings I’ve restored. I’m accustomed to the softest brushes. I dissolve the soot of age. This paint is velvety as a dog’s tongue. Grooves in the wood fill with it. More of the dream comes back. A horse was in front of us in the dark. We had to wait. We were riding horses through the forest. The pond is smooth. A mist hangs over it. I don’t want to do another layer so I put the paint away. I take off my clothes, dive in, and swim. Under me in the water is a small dead horse. I can see its head and open eyes staring up. They look milky blue and unseeing so I almost don’t help. I think I’m too weak to pull it out on my own. I grab at its neck and it leaps out of the water. Fish on its head fall off. It runs, streaming water from its white coat, up onto the sandy shore towards Bathsheba’s grave, the oldest in the cemetery. There was a dead woman found submerged in a pond. They were drying her out after reeling her in like a caught fish. They tried not to look at her naked body but they did. She looked mostly normal but hung from a rope in the air. All around the pond’s oval other small horses are running. They must be from a family but lost from each other.
I swim. I swam. I have swum.
Jessica Purdy holds an MFA from Emerson College. She is the author of STARLAND, Sleep in a Strange House (Nixes Mate, 2017 and 2018), The Adorable Knife (Grey Book Press, 2023), and You’re Never the Same (Seven Kitchens Press). Sleep in a Strange House was a finalist for the NH Literary Award for poetry. Her poems and micro-fiction have been nominated for Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and Best Micro-Fiction. Her poetry, flash fiction, and reviews appear in Gargoyle, About Place, On the Seawall, Radar, The Night Heron Barks, SoFloPoJo, Litro, Heavy Feather Review, and elsewhere. See more at jessicapurdy.com.
