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Board Administrator Username: mjm Post Number: 3795 Registered: 11-1998 |
Honorable Mention Vagrancy Laurie Byro Her disease was busy making lesions in her brain. She sat on her couch, eating Ben and Jerry’s, dodging guilt about how her day had been. It was Valentine’s Day. She was starting a love affair. She was embracing the easy and tough all at once, tired of writing poems about deer in the woods, or snow falling. She was thinking about endings. Her disease frightened her. The thought of need and dependence depressed her. She bristled when the well-intentioned changed the subject, avoided her eyes, stopped picking fights, gave in too readily. The couple went out and bought a Kugel. There happened to be one, purple like grapes, for sale on a wooden table and somehow even in February, there was a quickening to the seasons, a faster pace as if she had to hurry and not miss anything. There was a pair of jeans from a London Boutique, fringed and funky, studded with a Swarovski crystal, a day’s paycheck. This was the first week she had injected the medicine, plunged it into her belly, her thigh. She was afraid of dying too soon to wear them out or of winding up in a chair to which they would pay homage to her courage. She bought the jeans, brought them to a tailor, rushed two steps ahead of her future. Meanwhile, and she liked that word (used it a lot in poems) tasted the sweet “l” of it. Meanwhile, she wondered if the woods and the deer without someone to narrate its changes, would wither or startle, steal someone else’s imagination. She would dutifully write about this current attack on her brain, her body, She would write of this vagrancy. Meanwhile, she would pick up her tablet filled with paper from those trees, these woods, lined and spiraled, empty until now so that she might record her emptiness. A deer standing in a grove of birches licks the barb in her side, is startled by the familiar taste of her blood. It is snowing. It is still snowing |
