Hotel Room

The granite is cold on my bare feet the way expensive things are,
crystal heirlooms and heavy pens,
probably lugged here from Venice by a hundred calloused hands
and fitted snugly amongst its ancient sister slabs
seven stories above a strange buzzing earth
of dry-cleaned suits and damp cardboard,
days two-sided as coins rattling in old Tupperware.

Maybe because I’ve just eaten diver scallops
butter-drowned in their own shells
and gulped my rent’s worth of bubbly,
its spilled residue sticky down my throat and chest like jewels,
the night swells with that precise joy of the lavish,
that spoiled, unsatiated joy, the kind that always wants more.
Could this be life? This could be life.
I lean close to the hard floor
in a dress he bought me liquid as gin,
knees purple-cold, churning bruises,
palms forming auras of heat,
and stare into the tiny stone-veins
until they wiggle. How old are you? I ask.
How much have you seen? Who
has touched you?

And at the same time I am a child in the grass
with plaid cutoffs and a body
that hasn’t yet learned how to numb itself,
digging a hole in the sweet earth and hovering
my sunburned face above it, breathing in,
not wanting anything more than to inhale that alive smell
in the balmy elbow of a too-long Southern summer day.

The toilet flushes.
His gravity enters, stiffens the air-conditioned room.
When he sees me he laughs,
always half-jovial, half-like finding a dog chasing its tail,
asking, What on earth are you doing?
and I look at the pressed bed skirt,
the claw-foot chair in the corner,
the wide wide windows opening to a starless night,
and my body on its hands and knees
and I tell him
I don’t know, looking up at him,
I don’t know.

*

Heirlooms

I imagine my grandmother
bound by paper-bag lunches
and unreciprocated love,
watching divorce shimmer
like heat in the distance,

tucked away
in a Pacific-ocean
house made of glass,
china bright as mirrors,
laundry rolling endlessly,
lacquered wood, kitten heels,
whiskey in the linen closet,
candle-lit dining table.

Sometimes I think I remember her,
the cool sharpness of her rings,
the quiet sounds they made as she
fit a bottle between my gums.

I wonder about her, if she ever sat still enough
to feel the earth’s plates moving,
slow and achingly wise, if she felt
gravity
like that, so much it hurts.
I wonder if she ever felt like a forest, burning
its rot to survive.

I know her heart, I have
it, arrhythmic, rolling
over itself like
going under a wave too late, thrashing against
the sand, dizzy, bottom-up;
it’s congenital, they say,
and I think of heirloom pain,
of women tethered down to what they love most
of alcoholism and second chances
and curses and genes and the promises
our bodies make
but cannot keep.

In a photograph of us—
suspended in that in-between space before
anything happens,
my tiny cheek pressed against hers,
the two of us utterly unknowing—
she’d been sober for 6 months.
I turn it over.
The cursive reads “first sleepover”
as if there would be more.
I feel her salt
stuck to my face.

*

Originally from the West Coast, Cora Schipa is a poet and writer now residing in the marshland of Charleston, South Carolina, where she holds degrees in creative writing and sociology from the College of Charleston. She works as a creative writing mentor and tutor for girls and gender-expansive youth, and plans to continue her literary career at an MFA program in the coming years.