Flicker
Flicker You were up for your nursing home shift. I was up to feed the baby. We would meet in the bathroom, 4 A.M. I’d sit on the edge of the tub to nurse while you checked your teeth, your bangs, your white scrubs in the mirror with its two dim bulbs. What did we talk about? I don’t remember, but it was peaceful, three women, blood-related, two of them grown, and a baby. She seemed to like the sound of us, voices low not to wake her sleeping father, saying things we never said with the sun risen, the man up. You’d head out to catch the bus at the Main Street stop in the cold and dark. Drunks just tossed at closing time would catcall from their speeding cars. Your hundred-year-old patient waited at the home to beg you, hourly, for a hand job. “Hurry up. Please. I’m dying.” After, without you, I would still nurse the baby on the edge of the tub. The bathroom lights first began to flicker then, off and on, a barely audible buzz taking the place of our old confidences, your joke maybe, you who loved scary movies. True story, though only lies are believed. Off and on, there and in the next four houses, too. Bathroom after bathroom, man after man, baby to girl to woman, but the light always off/on off/on Now you see me, now Sherry Robbins, UNDERWORLD, 2020 Outriders Poetry Project
Sherry Robbins 