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Board Administrator Username: mjm Post Number: 3557 Registered: 11-1998 |
Honorable Mention NJ Summer (revised) Laurie Byro wanted to write long slow lines about the days which alternated rain or heat. Thunderstorms punctuated each night’s sleep. A haze burns off in the mornings. By August, yellow jackets cling to the skins of young children. My long brown hair begs to be cut. You cast your vote two years ago, took a slow meander through my long brown hair. Gold. Sunlight on the hairs of your wrists when you burnished me like a soft chamois. Your mother worried, took me out to lunch. She told me it all went wrong the summer she lived in the commune. She passes pictures across a table wet from the rings of glasses, hers a Margarita, mine a root beer and ice. I'd know you anywhere. Outside the group, slightly disgusted, obviously bored. I touch the fabric of her sleeve, want your hands all over me in her house after she leaves for work. “It’s okay,” I tell her, and she rolls her eyes. I want her to like me, to approve of this. Instead, she buys me salad and a quiche. Each Sunday, instead of church, I drive my husband to a meeting. I still can’t accept that these basements are the curators of peace. It is like church. Men can hardly wait to say “The Lord’s Prayer” and go outside to smoke. Michael is like the boy in the photo. Contemptuous, painfully bored. I’ve had to call the police twice this summer. I wish I had listened when you recognized the signs. I wanted to take you to Reims to see the church of the smiling angels. You said I was an angel the night I held your head and you threw up the sleeping pills, vomited your mother all over our bathroom tiles. The bile of her soaked into the cracks; it took days to scrub every trace of the brown Mississippi summer. Huck Finn on his raft couldn’t escape his father’s drunken rages. I draw no conclusions from an August full of rain. I used to call you “RainDog”, now I don’t call you at all. You are a shadow that stains the linoleum floor Autumn will make the trees hiss, sunlight slant differently than before. I am hoping to go to France next summer to see if the angels still smile. In the end all summers brew their stories, steep disappointments at the side of a dandelion field. |
