Zea Pippi Lotte van der Elsken

Nan and Brian in Bed, New York City, 1981

she is waiting. she got up, asked him to sit
still, laid back down: the camera 

in love with the distance between them. she
knows the weight of the drag of his fingers
now—to his mouth, her gaze frightened

for the thinness of her throat, the color of her 

eyelids. behind them: him again. it can not
be another man. she is holding her breath— 

i want to believe she is actually angry,
even if just for this 1/60s. she sees it 

as she reappears through chosen
aperture in the red dark in
hindsight. she lays the sheet of them, thinly, into 

a bath.
leaves him there, at first invisible, then–growing darker 

until a black square on a wet sheet & she never
stops him disappearing. 

if seeing the self in a past, the self in the dark, on
paper—appear in complete honesty can tell you
a secret you’ve kept from 

yourself, she hangs it and never looks
at it again. she leaves, does not take another

photograph.

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Zea Pippi Lotte van der Elsken grew up in Amsterdam and holds a BA in Photography from the Royal Academy of Art, The Netherlands. She is enrolled in the MFA Poetry program at San Diego State University where she received the Presidential Graduate Research Fellowship. She is Development Director at Poetry International and an instructor for SDSU's department of Rhetoric and Writing Studies. Her photography has been exhibited in galleries across The Netherlands and published in numerous magazines and papers alongside her non-fiction writing, such as De Volkskrant, Focus Magazine and others. Her poetry is forthcoming in Zone 3 and has been published by Michigan Quarterly Review, Foothill Poetry Journal and Pineapple Road Press. She lives in Encinitas with her soon to be husband and many plants.