Skinny Dipping When I First Arrived at Auburn
Things were different then, sudden freedom,
southeast Alabama sticky nights, mosquitoes,
lukewarm beer dribbling down naked breasts,
all lost, changed, yet worlds to be explored.
Here, I found, professors were not to be feared,
but to be joined in a party—a lake house with Dylan
blasting from a LP album through open windows,
frayed curtains blowing out into humid air.
Most times it started a beer-fermented brain,
unfettered by Jesus or Daddy watching.
Clothes on, then, a second time, pulled off
under cover of water, thrown on a dock,
made a squishy sound as they landed, panties
and all, on a slippery surface. Then next time,
ease of stripping, shirt and jeans, shorts, or dress
thrown carelessly on the grass full of chiggers,
Southeast Alabama’s gift to skinny dippers.
Who cares about the red rash, the itching
The next day? It was all worth it—those moments
before it was time to return to study Paradise Lost.
We were Milton’s fallen angels.
Pandemonium became a new heaven.
Nancy Owen Nelson’s poems have been published in a number of journals. Other publications also include her memoirs, Searching for Nannie B, 2015 and Divine Aphasia: A Woman’s Search for Her Father (2021),her chapbook, My Heart Wears No Colors, 2018, and Portals: A Memoir in Verse, 2019. Five Points South: Poems from an Alabama Pilgrimage (2022) was selected as Book of the Year by the Alabama Poetry Society. She currently lives in Florence, Alabama, where she serves as Executive Director of 7 Points Press.