Jackie Sabbagh
THE LIFEGUARD I’M PAYING
The lifeguard I’m paying to sit
By the bathtub and keep me
From drowning myself says, I don’t see
Why you have to be earthless.
I come up for air. What’d you say, I ask. I don’t see
Why I have to be shirtless, he says.
It helps you see the bathroom as a beach, I say.
I don’t want to be here
If you’re in love with me, he says.
He scoops up a handful of bubbles
And blows them at me like birthday confetti.
I’m not sure I could even love someone,
I say, who doesn’t feel the—
He sticks a finger in my mouth.
I don’t know why I did that, he says, maybe to shut you up.
Sank you, I say.
JACKIE SABBAGH is a writer and comic in Brooklyn, New York. She holds an MFA from the University of Florida. Her appears in The Louisville Review, Nashville Review, Passages North, Softblow, and Rust + Moth, the last of which nominated her for a Pushcart Prize.
ISSUE TWELVE features poetry by Samuel Amadon, Rennie Ament, Bruce Beasley, Brittany Cavallaro, Lidija Dimkovska, Denise Duhamel, Alexandria Hall, Rebecca Hazelton, Jose Hernandez Diaz, Kim Hyesoon, Gilad Jaffe, Michael Klein, Peter LaBerge, Nick Lantz, Eugenia Leigh, Robert Wood Lynn, Lisa Olstein, Eric Pankey, Tomaž Šalamun, Elizabeth Scanlon, Nathan Spoon, Sampson Starkweather, Peter Streckfus, Rodrigo Toscano, Stella Wong, and Felicia Zamora; fiction by Marie-Helene Bertino, Emily Neuberger, and Ed Taylor; nonfiction by Kate Colby, Krystal Languell, Kathryn Nuernberger, and J. M. Tyree; a film essay by Zack Finch; and Prageeta Sharma in conversation with Michael Dumanis.