The Women’s Locker Room at “Planet Fitness”

by Maria Stepanova
translated by Zachary Murphy King 

Nothing in common but warmth and fleece,
Lonesome keys and nine orifices,
Filled with what? moisture, pleasure, shit;
Covered by a mouth; closed by sleep.
Baking up: blood, tears, kids and wax.
Surrounding: their being or another’s flesh.
I enter, sit, from the nine of mine to
Remove. I stood to be.  And head to the pool.

Pink and yellow, big like babies,
Nakie-nude, towels to the neck—
Crossing the floor are flocks of girltrees.
Each to the shower, languidly leaning its trunk.
Like types of wine and species of aves
They must be classi-or curiosified:
Here’s collarbone plates; there: sails of shoulder blades.
We must catalogue each footarch height.

Soon these ones won’t be.  Soon they’ll be replaced.
Here’ll be wound in velvet, there: the stage refaced.
Visitors will stare amazed, not hiding tears,
At the combos of bones, skin, and black braided hair.

Some pretty boy on hand
Or baddie good’un
Plays in the kiddy garden:
Touching your plum,
Partaking of a pear,
Gathering, in his mouth, water:
Bequeathed to carved and jumbled wintertime,
The animal won’t recognize his brother’s mind.

This water pole might become ice,
Reason—an infection, air—gas,
Love-Doves will go and stride
In closed ranks through shooting stands.
And the door that opened on the swimming cube
Will open just a tad, like a zipper on a boot.
And we step out of slippers, nails and crowns,
From watches, juxtaposed rags, our voices’ sounds.

And into nostrils, mouths and ears, like kettle steam, out
En masse we pile, souls
Who broke the lock.

But like in forest school: the noisy surplus
Of creams, muscles, hair, armpits and lips.
Self-tanner and shame, as from vixens’ bores,
Look at our body surfaces to the lenses of pores.
But like in cattle cars, where squares of steam and
lengthy howls In narrowness and lusterlack roam-wander,
Unreachable, the sky becomes a brother.
And someone sings in the shower room.

In summer camps, in July’s blue shorts,
First hanging back, then straightening spine and neck,
My first I, scowling like a bullet,
Makes its very first step.
And furrowing the landscape, like crushing paper in the hand,
I look at it as almost through the sky.  And lie
Down, like ball lightning does in fields:
With a single revolution of the wheel.