My take on the founding fathers debacle is that you and I are more alike than I once supposed. We are both at this point in time somewhat stunned by life, but we know that even so, there are only two ways it can go. Both are pretty unspeakable, though one is definitely preferable, but if you are wondering why you will not know more until later, in fact, if you are wondering why you may never know more, I can tell you why: it is because, like most momentous events, these things can only be brushed up, switched around, and segmented into little pieces, and even then, in the long run, they come to get you, but by that point, for the most part, you are gone.

Someone, in general but not always, remembers you, but then again, in general, no one does. And then there is the ocean and the cliffs, and you forget why you’re here. And then there is the tiredness that involves wondering whether the world is tenderhearted.  

In truth, it’s probably not one way or the other, but that in of itself makes everything else more simple. The simplest version of things is that no one person can know everything, ever.

I do and I do and I do, but this thing I do doesn’t make me happy exactly. It’s not the same as watching Spanish soap operas or eating Breyer’s mint chocolate chip ice cream out of the blue clay bowl. No, this thing I do is simpler and more complicated all at once. But I suppose in truth, it is better than before, because before, I was ostensibly happiest when asleep.

But now I suppose you are wondering what it was like for me to forget, to forgive?

But you see, I haven’t a clue in the world. All I know is that a couple nights ago, we were walking at dusk through a park in Westerly, Rhode Island, and you were scared of getting lost and I was scared of getting mugged, but instead, we found a pondful of blooming water lilies. Now that’s what I call luck.

for JG

Anna Potter’s work has appeared in jubilat and on Poetry Daily. She received an MFA in fiction from the University of Wisconsin, and was the recipient of the James Merrill writer-in-residence residency for Spring 2007. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband and their beloved houseplant, Jade.

The week after I left the island,

it was Shark Week on Discovery.

Sure, I’d chosen to forget; in salty

surf, murky waters, there were apex

predators, the same way sex

is impossible, scalloped-edged, sad. Obscured

from view, it was a dolphin’s dorsal

that crested the waves. In my pink cowgirl

pajamas, face illuminated by the flicker

of a tiger shark snatching an albatross at the surface,

I ached for the serrated rows of teeth.

Renée K. Nicholson is a former ballet dancer. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing at West Virginia University. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Chelsea, Mid American Review, Paste, The Honey Land Review, Naugatuck River Review and The Gettysburg Review. Her blog can be found at http://thenicholsphere.blogspot.com/.

The first time R and I said “I love you,” what we really said was “Isle View,” which was a park on the Niagara River with a picnic table and a slipway for boats where R’s fat parents would drive us in the evenings, holding hands in the front seat while R and I groped in the back and whispered, “Isle View. Isle View forever.” Everyone knew the joke. It worked best to just mouth the words, or to say them aloud softly or quickly. One day, behind the garage, R said to me, “Isle View.” “Isle View,” I said. She said, “No. I’m serious. I really Isle View.”

I swallowed hard.

“Isle View, too,” I said, soft and quick.

She smiled, melted in my arms, and I stared with a cockeyed expression through her hair, wondering what we’d really said, that time and every time after.

II.

I had outgrown that old joke, but my next girlfriend, K, stuttered, and every time she said “I love you,” what she really said was “I l-l-l-ove you.” At first I endeared her stammering, but after months never hearing the phrase spoken in full, while saying it with eloquence myself the whole while, I grew anxious. “I l-l-l-ove you” was not, in a strict sense, “I love you,” and although I tried to think of it as a substitution or synonym for “love,” a codeword she was forced to use because of her impediment, I couldn’t help but be aware that “l-l-l-ove,” on those same grounds, could just as likely be a codeword for “boat” or “dwindle” or “Subaru.”

Finally I said to K, “I don’t understand what that is, that ‘l-l-l-ove. Do you mean, ‘love’?”

“Of course!” she said, angered.

But she still hadn’t said it.

III.

After A said “I love you” I went home and replayed the words in my mind but couldn’t capture exactly how she’d said it. It wasn’t a flat, robotic “I-love-you”; there was a stress on one of the three words. “I love you” sounded like she assumed other people didn’t, like I was unlovable but she would take on the dirty chore. “I love you” had an air of disbelief, as if of all the things she could verb-me—“I run you,” “I jump you,” “I skip you”—love was the most shocking. It felt accusatory, too, like I was merely fond of her, or suffered her, or disliked her altogether, and there she was like a martyr with all herlove. “I love you,” sounded even worse, implying there were others, but that I ought not worry since she didn’t love them. But now that she’d gone and said it that way I had no choice but worry. The final combination, “I love you,” was not really a combination at all, for a stressed word needs an adjacent word unstressed. The closest thing that phrase came to was a shriek, and that, I realized, is what I wished she’d done, shrieked it.