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Board Administrator Username: mjm Post Number: 4572 Registered: 11-1998 |
Honorable Mention Lost in the Eighties Treezaa (T. E. Ballard) in a field behind my father’s barn a group of us, an empty Coke can hollowed out,smoking god knows, watching cows. These people are not my friends. I will find others but they are not here now. We draw pictures in the dirt of two teachers fucking each other, none of us have fucked, but we see it’s power, draw it out like a map. I do not tell them how time speeds with every inhale, how it slips through my hands, a hundred tiny spiders off to spin regret. Or of my mother’s eyes how they look above, below but never really see. If I close my own, I cannot picture the woman of my childhood, only unhappiness fading in, out. Secretly, I read Hamlet in my basement. At night I dream myself queen, wear my father’s milking jacket. Several times I have awakened fingers tied in balls, words over, over again saying, I wash myself of this, I wash myself clean. These people are not my friends. Chris will jump out of his brother’s car, roll to his death. Tracy, deep blue eyes, long hair, tight jeans. Tracy, who beat me up every day after school, will marry the first boy who screws her before I even finish college. She'll have three kids; her eyes, the color of my mum’s. The queen will unbutton herself from Daddy’s red coat, sit in office after office discuss his touch, his smell. Free herself of tiny, tied up balls but this is not the day and these people are not my friends. But they will be, I’ll find them in memory, lost in some field, smoking fear. Someday I will bring us the map, the one I have carved from all I have lived. |
