Treehouse

Ariana Nadia Nash

In the shoebox room she sits on the edge of his bed and slides her back to rest against his side.  As she talks, her hands trace small galaxies.  Silk skin distracts her as he touches her hand and she twists down to him, swizzling stick to rest on his shoulder.  He wraps his arm around her; her hands dance his geography.  Their legs double-decker sandwich.  They dissolve into talking then touching.  Talking.  Touching.  Sometimes not listening, she just watches the blueberry line on his lip.  And she’s an ice cube thinking he doesn’t know her, thinking her touch could be a reed whip, and she puts her ear to his chest, listen to his heart beatbox.

˜

Not when I’m sick, he says, pulling his blue-line lips away from her threatening pucker, throwing back shaggy hair.  Biting lips into scarecrow line he shakes no.  She figure-eights her legs around his legs, her fingers around his neck, slow, seducing.  She goblets his chin, diving to drink.  He pulls away.  Her stomach coils.  Fine.  She squats beside her bag, shoveling herself from his floor into small compartments.  She turns to see fingers reaching and she’s a magnet, kissing his shoulder for forgiveness.  Then pulling away and back to the middle of the floor.  She’s inside herself—shut music box—saying goodnight.

˜

Where his sweet raw lips and tongue are, she can taste tart blueberry.  They are lying, rooting into each other.  His arm vines her waist, squeezing skin to skin.  Her arm pursuing his, holding him holding her.  When he inches his fingers towards her chest, she holds her breath until contact and exhales in a stutter.  Silk moving slowly, pressure so slight she could scream.

Ariana Nadia Nash is the winner of the 2011 Philip Levine Prize in Poetry for her first book Instructions for Preparing Your Skin. Her chapbook, Our Blood Is Singing, is forthcoming from Damask Press. She is the recipient of a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize and a MacDowell Colony residency. Her work can be found in Rock & Sling, Main Street Rag, and The Mom Egg, among other journals.

See also: A History of Remembering, and Ariana’s list of 5 Things You Should Read in our ongoing contributors’ series.

♦

Ariana Nadia Nash

A lonely woman loved a wall, and the bricks left her lips bleeding.

The tortured man traveled for days with burnt skin along a river, slipping along the soft mud banks, scanning the trees for snakes, finally escaping.

A family became a forest.

A silk-skinned woman loved a silk-skinned man but he slipped through her fingers.

A husband, hoping to atone, kept asking his wife if she wanted more logs for the fire.

Childhood friends raced up oak trees to stare over the canopy at the height of the blazing world.

A stone-faced father sat very still and became a boulder.

The friends grew apart, and lived always half-forgetting the other.

A lonely woman loved a spoon, until she broke it rapping her knuckles.

A family became a lit match in the forest they had been.

A boulder realized he was alone and slowly crumbled.

A dying mother cried across continents and so a son came to pray over her body before it burned.

Learning that her skin was like the ocean, the silk-skinned woman rocked herself to sleep.

A child thought that some days the sun left the sky but no one would tell her where it went.

Covering herself in velvet cloth and velvet night, the widow climbed the trellis to her roof where she stood for years with her toes at the eave.

A silk-skinned woman painted her body—one creature for every man she’d loved, and a dragon at her back for her father.

A family became a gondola and the singer in that gondola, poling the water at sunrise.

A widow rose like smoke into the forgiving night after waiting cloaked so long on her roof.

A man three times divorced wrote about roses.

A family became a fish.

By chance the friends one day met and remembered the other again, and placed that sadness with the others they had bound in leather and collected on shelves, and took down some days to read.

A child thought that some days the sun left the sky and so she left the earth to find where the sun went when it left the sky.

He thought he had escaped, but the tortured man never forgot the sound of his own overgrown nails on metal.

A family became a fisherman that caught the fish they used to be.

A lonely woman loved a window and built a seat so she could sit forever and stare through the eyes of her beloved.

Ariana Nadia Nash is the winner of the 2011 Philip Levine Prize in Poetry for her first book Instructions for Preparing Your Skin. Her chapbook, Our Blood Is Singing, is forthcoming from Damask Press. She is the recipient of a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize and a MacDowell Colony residency. Her work can be found in Rock & Sling, Main Street Rag, and The Mom Egg, among other journals.

See also: Ariana’s prose poem Presentiment and her list of 5 Things You Should Read in our ongoing contributors’ series.

♦