Nina Couser Writes

You grew up in haunted houses. You thought everybody did. Ghosts were a fact. Your mother saw them. Or wished she did. They lived in various rooms throughout the house. They waited on the stairs at night. As you tiptoed from your room, they lumbered from their den on the fifth stair, shrouded, sad. Were they to have grabbed you, you would have known the full extent of what it means to be unhappy, even at your young age. Their sadness might have tainted you for the rest of your life. You hid in your room, under the covers, thirsty, whispering to your sister. She felt it too. The hairs on your forearms touched as you clung together.  Mum, you whispered, without trying to waken her. This was a game. Ghosts were the familial glue you brought with you from house to house. Once when you are ten years old, your parents drive you to a field in the middle of nowhere.  Under the shadow of a purple hillside, the gable wall of a zombie cottage breathes its last breath. You c...

Shells Marriage is a shell, a space for sound. You can be standing right there on the edge of the sea but you'll have marriage cupped to your ear,  rushing through you like  the swell of soft-closing doors  in another room as you squeeze your thighs into tired old jeans, the wet sucking sound  of rubber on gravel as he backs out  of the drive on Sundays, always leaving white noise inside the silence, a scratching  of vows under the arched eaves of your semi-detached,  the sound in your head like hand-stitched lace trailing on dry paper, incessant  as sea foam frothing  on the rocks, bold as mice spooring on the lawn. by Nina Couser This poem won 2nd prize in the  Pen Nib International Writing Competition 2021  *to spoor = to track or trail an animal or person Nina Couser When I wrote this poem, I was thinking about all the ways that love can change, morph or even die.  Shells are what we collect on days by the beach, which can ...