Sylvia Plath, Sharon Olds, Kath Cruz, Me

The whole creative writing class is dorming. We love it. It's nothing really, just a big room and a door that opens to the back where we wash and hang our clothes. In that big room is me, Abi, La Verne, Kath, Kit. I get the big bed and everyone is so envious.

We have grand plans for our dorm. Parties, better decor, what to do with the ugly back part.

Abi is trash talking her ex boyfriend in the Spiderman costume. Kit and fiddling with her bangs and talking about this and that. Kath is giggling. La Verne is biting her nails.

We compare notes. Non fiction, fiction, poetry, playwriting. I tell them about Noel's crazy antics in poetry. How he turned from metaphysical to confessional without batting an eye. How during Mondays we all get drunk on wine and start to read poetry better. I tell them about Kit's absentmindedness. How she's always liable to say, "What are we doing today? Workshop ba? Gosh, I'm so sabog!"

We can hear the ruckus the boys are making right next door. We love it this way. Girls together and boys on the side.

I'm lying on my big bed feeling mighty comfortable. I look at Kath and say, "Kath, I really miss the way you would lean over to whisper how much you liked my sucky confessional poems!"

Kath laughs and says, "I guess we're both closet confessionals! Sylvia Plath, Sharon Olds, you and me!"

And somehow it feels like we made a deal and to seal the deal we just made we recite from memory:

Sex Without Love
Sharon Olds

How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other's bodies, faces
red as steak, wine, wet as the
children at birth whose mothers are going to
give them away. How do they come to the
come to the come to the God come to the
still waters, and not love
the one who came there with them, light
rising slowly as steam off their joined
skin? These are the true religious,
the purists, the pros, the ones who will not
accept a false Messiah, love the
priest instead of the God. They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-
vascular health--just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.