by Jennifer Whalen

Place Shape

Darkness hazed the nightclub’s bathroom:

women smearing liner into coves

of their eyes, every stall door painted black.

Someone ripped the mural of Jackie Kennedy;

I didn’t recognize these people

or the thoughts they made me feel.

With my eyes on my eyes in the mirror,

I fumbled essentialism:

I didn’t want Whitman to be wrong - yes,

yes, we have our multitudes,

but in that particular moment I thought

of the various shapes I take, this shape

is something like the realist. Hours later,

I tried to fathom Jackie as past tense,

reeling rooms as if to track an exact path

to the dance floor would slip me

closer to purity. Not purity

like white sheets & chastity

but purity like symphonies

dwindling down to the sound

of a single set of strings.

I wanted a song I could mouth words through.

I pretended invisibility. Even in reduced form,

I couldn’t fold inward slim enough.

Both the spectated & spectator,

I was too timid to look right alone.

Maybe I was just being hard on myself.

I’ve never worked up the resolve

to start clawing walls. Once I stole a candle

from a table to keep a single evening

near me. But to fling to a hard surface

stripping layers of Jackie’s face,

who takes that form?

She’s somewhere on that floor,

but not a shape I’ll take. Soon,

I missed weather, moved through

a backdoor: the breeze in the night,

the night rippling folds in my clothes.

There’s a lesson somewhere in here,

but I can’t pan high enough to see it

or zoom near enough to live it.

A man sat near me on a stone wedge.

I didn’t take his cigarette. He’s not a light

to carry with me. He asked what song

I’d like to bear. Maybe the night’s solace

is every shape has a chance

to change; it’s the everpressure

of possibility that rings the same.

Tonight

If it was going to start, it was going to be small:

a perfect helix curl in my hair;

foot taps along a steady melody.

If it would happen, it might as well happen

like patchwork or not at all.

Lights dimmed to the edge of non-existence

as I swiveled my chair. Not a typical

debate of lingering or leaving,

rather the hazards of diving

& sinking. It wasn’t New York City

or L.A., but clusters of buildings scraped the dark;

their windows, tiny light-filled cardinals

patterning the night. When I picked diving,

I dove. If it was going to work,

it had to be barely perceptible:

my fingertips tracing water circles

on a wooden table, a glance

through strands of hair.

Someone turned a knob on speakers

the way stakes in movies rise alongside volume.

I wasn’t the femme fatale.

I wasn’t going to whisper life

into the lifeless. I wouldn’t return what’s lost

or forgotten, this night

or any. Like grains of sand found in old pockets,

we’ll remember it simply & fondly,

a red sequin snapped free

of a favorite dress. If I was going to love

this cherry-topped thing, or me,

or anyone, it was going to take years,

but this is irrelevant: it was tonight.

Jennifer Whalen’s poems can be found or are forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Denver Quarterly, Southern Indiana Review, New South, Cimarron Review, Grist, & elsewhere. She was the 2015-2016 L.D. & LaVerne Harrell Clark House writer-in-residence at Texas State University. She currently teaches English at the University of Illinois Springfield.