"Dark Bathroom"

Jessica Purdy

Jessica Purdy holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in many journals, including The Night Heron Barks, Menacing Hedge, Radar, SoFloPoJo, Harpy Hybrid, Lily Poetry Review, One Art, Poemeleon, and Museum of Americana. Her books STARLAND and Sleep in a Strange House were both released by Nixes Mate, in 2017 and 2018. Sleep in a Strange House was a finalist for the New Hampshire Literary Award for Poetry. She is poetry editor for the anthology Ten Piscataqua Writers.

“‘Dark Bathroom’ is from a manuscript I am currently at work on entitled The Adorable Knife: Poems on Frances Glessner Lee’s The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. I am obsessed with the Nutshells enough to have seen them when they were exhibited at the Renwick Gallery in Washington, DC. Each poem in the manuscript is named after a ‘nutshell,’ a meticulously crafted crime scene diorama meant to help police officers hone their observation skills. It is my intention to honor Frances Glessner Lee’s own attention to detail in crafting these nutshells, as well as to imagine possible ‘solutions’ by giving voice to the stories told in the crime scenes. In some of the poems, the speaker is the victim, and in some, the speaker could be the perpetrator; in still others, it is the poet’s voice speaking.”

—Maggie Wilson deceased. Questioned: Lizzie Miller. Reported: November 6, 1896, by Sergeant Moriarty of the Central City Police

It’s their wide hands with thick fingers
I imagine sliding into me
that make it so unnerving to think about
and I want to watch them as they cut
their bricks and lift the saw
with dust flying all around their beautiful
chests, cigarettes hanging from their lip
as if air is not a necessity and they are
not looking at me for once. Since I was
a teenager they have had their share
of ogling wanton looks at my young body
and now that I am older I can say
that they still turn to look. Now that
I’ve lost everything, it’s only fitting
that I take their money and toy
with their emotions. It’s the time I have
them into my rented room where I drink
whiskey and run a bath, smoke cigarettes
and apply the red lipstick
with the perfumed scent I’ll leave
on his body. It’s that I don’t see him
coming up from behind me
after I tell him we’re through
that is my downfall. His surprise attack
has me around the neck
his thick hands close over my windpipe
and the lights dim. After I’m dead,
my legs in full rigor mortis,
he puts me in the tub and the water
runs down my crushed throat
like a waterfall over shattered rock.
I am found and presumed drunk
and drowned in my own drink.