When Nan Goldin Danced in Low-Life Go-Go Bars in Paterson, N.J.

When Nan Goldin danced in low-life go-go bars in Paterson, N.J.,
I was a girl in Paterson, N.J., living next to a low-life go-go bar.

While men fed her tips and she tucked them into her bikini,
a fist hit an eye in a house in Paterson, like a flash going off

in a dark kitchen. And in the corner, a girl stood watching.
In the go-go dance of memory, the woman who was the girl

cannot recall the fist reach the eye, but sees an arm blocking
a door. Nan Goldin took the bus back to New York, and the girl

sat next to her, not knowing she was an artist. The girl looked
out the window and said, in each house a family, in each kitchen

a fist and an eye. Nan Goldin counted the tips to see how much film
she could buy. A friend dragged Nan Goldin from the apartment

that night. The self-portrait of her bloodied eye saved her. The girl’s
brother told her years later: What you don’t remember is that

he gave her a black eye. She watches from a corner of her life
the eye turn red, black, purple, green, yellow. Nan Goldin is the artist

who made art that saved the girl, and the girl will make an art
of her life. She takes the bus from Paterson, N.J., to Nan Goldin’s

loft, and inserts a slide of the black eye into Nan Goldin’s
projector. The girl wishes her mother could be there, to see herself

larger than life on the screen. Nan Goldin danced go-go in Paterson
so she wouldn’t have to take off her top. The memory is not a striptease

that ends with a blackened eye. The girl slips it like a slide into the part
memory won’t reveal, to complete the scene in which she is small and

cannot help her mother leave. Nan Goldin photographed herself to force
the door open. She pushed through it. I pushed through it.

This poem appears in the June 2024 print edition.