"In the Outdoor Shower with My Pregnant Wife" by Keetje Kuipers

In the Outdoor Shower with My Pregnant Wife

The old frisbee from Burger Chef, once red
but faded now the pale pink of my wife’s
widening aureoles, lies upturned
beneath the saltwater drip of our sagging
beach towels. This world is full of objects
succumbing to the gentle ebb of decay. But her body—
loosening breasts and blue-veined thighs caught
in a cascade of wet light as she turns
beneath the showerhead’s senseless spray—
is not one of them. That low-blooming
shudder and heft at her hips can’t compare
to her belly button’s skin stretched taut
and thin, become the pale sail of a boat
screaming into harbor. I am here
to praise the way in which everything
I have ever loved about her body
is about to be ruined forever in the breaking
open. Tonight the wind will come up,
turn the towels on the line into fat bells,
churn the waves into a froth, drag the sand
out and leave it where our toes can’t touch.
In the morning, the ocean will return
to its languid sheet, but the beach will be strewn
with the wreckage. I want already
the body scarred by stretch marks, the extra flap
of skin to hang soft at her waist, the feet
that will never again be quite so small.
I want to worship the body after the storm,
the one I’m imagining already
as she unfolds the straps from her shoulders
and peels the suit off, her skin covered in
those minute and glittering fragments of shell
some people insist on calling sand.

Appears in Lonely Women Make Good Lovers (BOA Editions, 2025).

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Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan

Keetje Kuipers’ fourth collection of poetry, Lonely Women Make Good Lovers, won the Isabella Gardner Award, received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, and was recommended by Ron Charles for the Washington Post Book Club. Her poetry and prose have appeared in BOMB, the New York Times Magazine, and Poetry, among others, and have been honored by publication in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. Keetje has been a Stegner Fellow, NEA Literature Fellow in Creative Writing, and the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident. Previously a VP on the board of the National Book Critics Circle and a tenured Associate Professor at Auburn University, Keetje currently teaches at festivals and conferences around the world including at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the dual-language writers conference Under the Volcano in Tepoztlán, Mexico. Keetje is Editor of Poetry Northwest, and lives with her wife and children in Montana.

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