| InterBoard Poetry Competition | |
VAGRANCY
Laurie Byro
(The Melic Review RoundTable)
Her disease was busy
making lesions in the brain.
She sat on the 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 tired of writing poems
about deer in the woods, or snow falling.
She was thinking about endings.
The thought of need and dependence
depressed her. She bristled when
the well-intentioned changed the subject
or stopped picking fights.
The jeans had come from London.
Fringed and funky, they were studded
with a Swarovski crystal. Her husband
said she looked hot in them,
her navel peeking over the waist.
She imagined the salesgirl’s expression
as she plunged the needle into her belly.
It was the first week she had injected
the medicine. She was afraid of dying
too soon to wear the jeans out or of ending
up in a chair.
When she had bought the jeans, she wore them
right out of the store. She walked
all the way home. Meanwhile, she wondered if
the woods and the deer
without someone to narrate them,
would wither or startle, steal
someone else’s imagination.
She would dutifully write about the
current attack on her brain, her body.
She would pick up her tablet
filled with paper, from those woods,
empty until then,
so that she might record the vagrancy.
A doe is standing in a grove of birches,
licks the barb in her side, becomes
startled by the taste.
It is snowing. It is still snowing.
Judge John Poch’s comment: “This poem comes up against a subject I usually find unsuccessful. The struggle to write a poem. The act of writing. Usually, when we talk about the difficulty or failure of poetry, it’s because we are actually failing to write the poem. Not so here. The imagination is free to roam into lively territory and real pain here. I wish, though, that I knew, more specifically, the disease and the treatment. The injecting of the medicine in the middle of the poem is a bit confusing. Where’s this going on, and how?”
About the InterBoard Poetry Competition
Archive of IBPC Winners
Honorable Mentions, March 2004
