Two Very Nice Girls Who Ran a Sandwich Place

One of Hemingway’s lesser-known

Depictions, from a handwritten

Letter sent to Maxwell Perkins,

Describes the grim recovery

Of bloated bodies following

The devastating hurricane

Of 1935 that tore

Through parts of the Florida Keys—

More dead than I’d seen in one place

Since the Great War, 1918–

And, most of those dead, veterans

Who, having survived that conflict,

Had ended up in a work camp

In the midst of the Depression,

Living in shacks on Windley Key.

Now their bodies sprawled, like cordwood,

Scattered everywhere and bloated,

But the most disturbing passage

In his description of the scene

Lies where Hemingway writes Perkins

Of the bodies of two women

Stripped naked by the storm and thrown

Into the branches of a tree—

Swollen and stinking . . . breasts as big

As balloons, flies between their legs.

I recognize them as the two

Very nice girls. . . . Very nice girls?

Something in his language suggests

That death made whores of them, or that

Bloated corpses with bloated breasts

And flies between their legs (surely

The flies were hardly so confined)

Shouldn’t be expected to turn

Out to be two very nice girls

Who ran a sandwich place. What gives?

Were women so sexualized

In his mind that even in death

Naked female bodies could be

Only grotesquely erotic?

His focus seems more than morbid,

More than mere memento mori.

Was death, for him, pornography?

The mind shakes itself off, moves on,

Other things to read. The women

Whose ghosts entered Hemingway

To emerge disturbingly phrased

Are wholly words now, as are we,

As is Ernest Hemingway, whose

Own ghost spins weirdly through dead texts,

Copied from holograph to page

To code to haunt another age.