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Board Administrator Username: mjm Post Number: 4208 Registered: 11-1998 |
Honorable Mention For Art’s Sake Lauriette (Laurie Byro) My husband called my poetry “a little hobby.” When I read him a day’s work, he would smile. with half-closed eyes, looking at a point beyond—humoring me— with correct and appreciative sounds. I met a man who drove a truck. During long stretches of highways, he’d compose poems in his head. At truck stops, he’d write sonnets on the back of a borrowed waitress pad. He knew the best places for hamburgers, the best woods, where we would meet to moan to the music of owls hunting, bats mating mid-air. My husband and I began sleep-walking past each other. I’d let out a cat, he’s make sure the furnace was working. One night, after a lovely afternoon mid-summer, my friend and I rolling on a bed of moss, I sat and wrote about the details. How the sweat beaded off my nipples and trickled in between us. How he licked the salt off the hairs of my belly. How his pupils would enlarge just as I would feel his shudder tickle the inside of me. I left nothing from my poem. Sated, I bundled it up with an old tax return and put it into a knapsack in the basement. You know the rest. How three years later, we are audited for some strange error. How he discovers the old poem and stops on the cellar steps to read it. But what you don’t know is the sounds. I have not been able to describe with human words. How only an animal knows these sounds. A fox whose leg is trapped by steel teeth, as it tears its leg off to free itself. How the creature keens and writhes mourning the loss. The howling moon, the bloodied night. It was my husband. Finally, paying homage to my poem. |
