Dark Room
When I was 24, we lived in a one-bedroom
second-floor walk-up in a small French town–
our first time living together just the two of us.
The apartment’s kitchen and living room
overlooked the street. The bedroom window
opened onto an airshaft–– no natural light.
Darkness suffused the bedroom, sank
into the brown velvet bedspread. Color
and light played in the front rooms,
electric light caressed the pink-tiled
bathroom with its deep sit-in tub, abundant hot water.
Daytimes we basked in color and light. Nights––
we found each other in the deep darkness.
When my parents visited we said he lived
in the dark back room, I in the bright living room.
They didn’t believe us. For one thing,
his royal-blue leather jacket, draped on the back
of a living room chair, caught the sunlight.
Vivienne Popperl lives in Portland, Oregon. Her poems have appeared in Clackamas Literary Review, Timberline Review, Cirque, Willawaw, About Place Journal, and other publications. She was poetry co-editor for the Fall 2017 edition of VoiceCatcher. She received both second place and an honorable mention in the 2021 Kay Snow awards poetry category by Willamette Writers and second place in the Oregon Poetry Association’s Spring 2022 contest “Members Only” category. Her first collection, A Nest in the Heart, was published by The Poetry Box in April, 2022.
