Exposure

Abstract

Exposure Jordan Nakamura (bio) I abandoned the camera years earlier.I couldn't spare all I aimed to honor,was burnt by each moment feeling likea missed shot. What I did frame was also failure.Portraits doomed to their flatness. Stills of timethat still passed. Always the specter of betterways to render, to record. I ached to see a personlaugh again. Just see and not capture. To touch, to beempty-handed, having reached. When I felt I sawyou honestly, it seemed no response was fitting.I was too quiet. Your face seemed impenetrable. But your arms testify to how easily the skin can scar. Up close they are textured with accents of what seem like shadow, like a field beginning to reforest and what is healing isn't different than what is, in the end, darker.We are close enough to taste, whichmeans close enough to bemistaken—how at the rightdistance the sweetness of sweatis indistinguishable from the fumeof opened jasmine. Once, for onceI'm not too quiet and we share imperfectlyand actually. One nightyou say: we could keep talking orwe could—and we finish the rest with our hands. I tried—as in slipped into the ruse, neither chosen nor even noticedas effort, though it had been—to make you eternal in my mind. It's time, too, I try to fix when I pin you against the wall the way you ask for and we crash as tides grafting landslip from cliffs, your eyes daring me over [End Page 81] into nightsurf, where coming and going become twinned and become daylight. Like fitting the goddamn sea into a teacup you'd said before your exam, meaning to cram the lesson. Memory also is like that, only its cup is made of air and a little bone. Each pour is a given. A spill, a given. A misfire is still a fire.You asked me what I want, whatwe should do. Spent and half-lit, I look past you to the blackand white pictures on the wall,which depict a sea of rough wavescresting with spray—or no, a hilllined with gravestones. The lightclutching onto or being clutched byshade. It is never enough, to tell.This all leads to leaving. I know it.I know it, and open the same. [End Page 82] Jordan Nakamura Jordan Nakamura is a writer born and raised in Hawaii and living in South Central, Los Angeles. He holds an MFA in Poetry from Antioch University and his writing, interviews, and articles have appeared in the Adroit Journal, Tupelo Quarterly, Zócalo Public Square, Lunch Ticket, and the Curator Magazine. Copyright © 2020 Middlebury College Publications