FEEL
MAY I SEE YOUR WRITTEN WORK? POETRY
SEASICK FICTION
Samantha Williams St. Augustine, Fla. Graphic Design major, Creative Writing minor
Cameron Hughes Chapel Hill, N.C. Graphic Design major
“May I read your written work?” is not so simple a question when you consider how it’s born. My poems are in my blood, flowing through my body, organic and free. The process is not that of a typist, thought-hand-pen-paper, but rather, a writer. My pen is my knife. I stab repeatedly into skin, slicing away the thin membrane between poet and poem, writer and work, instrument and words. It begins with difficulty, inexperienced fingers sticking and shivering throughout, but soon, I loosen, and glide with ease. Blood spatters, pours, cascades onto pale, unblemished paper. And with that, the innocence is ruined. Hurdles overcome, I peel away my layers piece by piece, bit by bit, discovering as I go that skin forms stanza, veins become rhymes, life-giving blood to life-giving lines. So you see – “May I read your written work?” is not so simple a question when you consider how it’s born. 60
PORT CITY REVIEW
ISSUE 02
It is night and the boat is soaked through with the heat of a Virginia summer. The air conditioner is broken despite the condition of the boat, a proper yacht with teak and stainless steel. The two of you move to hold clammy, sore hands, letting them rest between you on the couch that is too shallow and props you upright with rigid posture, the kind that looks exaggerated and uncomfortable, the kind that embodies the moment. You’re sick of watching American Beauty, but you know it makes him happy and you know his happiness, the easy sag of his shoulders and the crooked smile, they’re more important than the movie. You know he’d hold your hand forever and that in these moments, after she corners him and berates him in that cold, sadistic, spidery way that she does everyday, he needs your sticky too-hot palm in his. This is all he’ll ever have the courage for. They never are happy together. Both of them are good people, but you can’t help knowing he needs something better. He’s bursting with talent and he’s bright and he lives in this boat, still a skipper at 30. The bickering is incessant, those uncomfortable moments at dinner, when she’ll interrupt him to have a word. It seems to you that marriage is voluntary. Why would he stay? Does the incessant berating get tiresome? The seat beneath you creaks unnervingly and it makes his hand constrict around yours. You’re a good friend, he says. Your midsection feels inverted in the most uncomfortable of anxious ways. “A good friend.” You know. You do it because you love him. He offers tea and looks at your hands as if to ask them, too, would they like some tea? And he stands and shuffles to the galley and you watch him in his rhythmic tea production, the comfort of knowing how he takes his tea in the hope that it will overwhelm the discomfort of physical distance. He knows how you take your tea, too, and for the moment you forgive ISSUE 02
PORT CITY REVIEW
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