The Stranger

He told me to read The Stranger,
though I didn’t need Camus to tell me
bad things happen to people at the beach.

Downy ocean, we said, in exaggerated
mid-Atlantic drawls, as if our family lived
on a shore made of feathers.

When she was twenty-three, my aunt
sleep-walked out onto Ocean Highway,
headlights caught in the silk of her nightgown,

hair tangled with salt and wind. She came back
into her body under the awning of a new hotel
a few hundred yards from the sea.

And that same year of my life, something
was happening to me. My body blinking on
and off. Once, in the shallows, my knees buckled,

and I came to with my cousin holding me,
saying Jesus Christ, what the— The plane-crash
putt-putt flashed its neon signs.

Disaster! Stranded! No going back!

When I told him what happened on the beach,
the man I loved said that in Russian, there was a word
for the ghost of a drowned woman.

I didn’t know what to make of that.
The nightclub closed its floating bar after
too many jellyfish attacks. I lost my job,

cocktail waitress wading back and forth
in a bikini. On Sundays, we went to mass
at Saint Mary, Star of the Sea. Mary,

mermaiding out of her shrine to hear our prayers.
But I couldn’t ask anything of her, then.
I didn’t need to be forgiven, at least not yet.

Eileen, Before a Date

She leans toward the mirror, clutching a metal lever
to the rim of her eye, and pauses for me
to release the shutter. Eyelash curling,

said a man in my studio, looks like an exorcism,
the demon crimped out of her
by its little hairs. I called it Portrait Before,

though that could describe every photograph.
Before Eileen’s boyfriend took her out to dinner,
or to the movies, or to the river,

which might have smelled like clay and dead fish,
or cherry blossoms, or possibly urine,
because it was spring, and so many things

come out of the thaw. She might have joked,
how seductive is the perfume of the city,
and he would have laughed, or he wouldn’t.

No one would say, look, here, this is when she was happy.
Sometimes, I think photography is unforgivable:
to suggest there could be a hinge

between this moment and the next.
That photo cannot say how long Eileen
pressed her fingers together,

when she lowered the curler down to the sink,
if she smiled after that. Cannot say how long
she went on looking at the thick lashes.

Victoria Kornick’s first book, Relief, will be published by Sarabande Books in 2027. She teaches creative writing at Emory University.