Vertigo by Rachel Jamison Webster

From Volume 32, 2005

isn’t fear you’ll fall,
but fear you’ll jump.

he said. We’d stopped
on our walk to half-hang
over the river bridge.
His words eddied below
as if he knew I’d see myself in them,
slipping through their twist
to something I was not.

The river went on cleansing itself,
shedding candy wrappers and small sticks,
sucking others up.

We’d always known
one would leave the other,
just not who
and this had given us a vantage point,
a distant squint into water’s wrinkled sliding,
as if we’d been young together, long ago,
and had walked slowly
from a bridge and home,
turning the key in the lock,
tiptoeing up carpeted stairs
to kiss and go on kissing
while we undressed.

From this height,
I can see our pale thighs
lower shyly into the bath,
his half-extended cock nodding
up into my hand.

Rachel Jamison Webster is a professor of creative writing at Northwestern University and the author of four books of poetry and cross-genre writing. She has taught writing workshops through the National Urban League, Chicago Public Schools, Gallery 37, and the Pacific Northwest College of Art, working to bring diversity and antiracist awareness into creative writing curricula. Rachel’s essays, poems, and stories have been published in outlets including Poetry, Tin House, and the Yale Review. Benjamin Banneker and Us is her first nonfiction book. She lives in Evanston, Illinois, with her husband and daughter.