mary june brown

Endings still hurt, though she has had her fair share, and surely a thin layer of protective numbness should have moved in by now? This ending still hurt, a hard-packed snowball hitting a naked and bent spine. Was it the cold of it or the punch of it that caused her to shiver? Even the memory of warm whispers (a lyric, from a song, from a playlist, on a device) cannot combat the icy abrasions from these April storms.

Endings still hurt.
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DINNER IN AUTUMN
*This piece was purchased and has been published elsewhere, however I retain the rights.

A work bell pushed a peal and she

She ran fourteen blocks onward home

Home where they agreed to meet

Meat and candied beets, repast’s entity

Hurried home where she longed for him

Long foreign doorbell hummed at eight-oh-ten

(ate meat and candied beets)

He came nodding with his sly fox style

Smile, but do not touch her amber hair

Her hair not done and those are hot rollers

Hot, rolled her onto the stair

A wolf feasted on meat and candied beets

Eight weeks later he took his leave

Leaves and grass and hands gather round

Rounded belly thrum and beats

Beets, sugared, and warm meet

###

Lament for a Recorded Affair
*This piece was purchased and has been published elsewhere, however I retain the rights.

For you it was one lifetime about such lifetimes
You were motivated by what people term “soul mates”
Something you didn’t have with Joanna, but then
It’s rare, this connection, you went on and
Your new young lady horded it in the moment
Payment tossed to her by means of a line

She laced a little book to record these matters
An advisor inside told her that lifetimes expire quickly
Rotton-sweet words and body motion sink into memory
The book filled up inkwise, and when she closed it
You had gone elsewhere to think and so never called

It’s been near a decade and she recalls
Little snatches of the cloak-and-dagger meetings
Naturally your hair had foxy grey character then
(Twenty years old and she thought it charming)
But you loved your good reputation and so would never leave

Let me into your reputation, she plead, but you wanted
Darkness and legs moving and a mouth anew meeting yours
She gave her mouth and legs and what dark places she had
After this you went home to Joanna and read, forgetting

Well, there was the diary but she lost track of it
We figured it all got recorded in her bones

###

A paralysis sets in, and she is the force that caused it. The most clawing time she can remember, hands bloodied as they claw against the coarse granite of the slopes around her. She cannot get a handhold, she cannot stop the falling, either.

She fell down a flight of stairs, and she took too many painkillers for the bruising. In that woozy place between pain and intoxication, she decided to try passion. To try spontaneity.

She cannot get a handhold.

###

The winter presses up its face against the window, and even with the thermostat set to 78 degrees, I can’t pretend its not there. Seeping in through the ducts, fissure cracks, and musty screens that should have been replaced years ago.

I wish I could write better. I wish I could be Ellen Gilchrist for a day, writing about dreams and sad old actresses, about people trying to impress one another with how sane they are. I wish I could write.

That wasn’t her type of thing and that certainly wasn’t her type of person. New Year’s Resolution #14: Listen to her instincts.

Christ is born.
In all aridity, despair, hopelessness…Christ sees us every moment. I pin my faith on that. Whatever breaks our hearts cannot undo that faith.

Missing your love
with God’s so
close at hand.
It seems somehow
a sacrilege
but I think
God understands.*

* Thank you, Peter M.

“Just remember that you allow others to define who you are; that’s a choice. You get to determine who defines who you are, and remember you can choose that. I hope it will be you. But if it’s not you, I hope it’s someone like me. I love you.”

Thank you.

He was sharp, a paring knife. Slicing through the weakest point of the heel, through flesh. Into bone, splicing the cartilage, into shortcomings, flaws, inadequacies, errors, faults, failings, deficiencies, insufficiencies, weaknesses, limitations.

Knowing him was like taking a boot off, rolling the sock down, and exposing the pink flesh of the heel. Here, right here. Draw your edge right along this delicate bone. Nick at the soft underflesh.

(Limping to the drugstore. Need bandages.)

The office was chilly, and she considered turning up the thermostat. Turning in her leather chair, the monitor caught her eye and she swung back to face it. The cursor blinked, staccato, repeating itself. A black vertical line, demanding that she write. Blink, blink, blink.

She inclined her head, eyed the cursor. “Okay. I get it. I should write.” But what?, she wondered. What words could she find to say the myriad things she wanted to say? She closed her eyes, shut the image of the blinking line out of her head, inclined her head again, positioning her hands as a pianist positions their fingers over the smooth ivory keys, and she leaned in, playing.

Come closer, she played. Her dark hair fell in a curtain over one eye as she leaned in, touching her forehead nearly to the keyboard, and she brushed it back, annoyed, losing the tempo of her keystrokes.

Come closer, she played, Give me your arguments and your sweetness, give me your calling out, your hypothesis about a greater moral code, your silly Elvis voice, your playlists and your earnest dialogue about consideration for others. Don’t ease up on me, be softer with me. Everything. Tell me everything you’ve already said again, and tell me everything you wish to say. I want to hear it again, for the first time, in the future, inside the spirit, within the phosphate of my bones, through the ends of my hair, between my eyelashes. Everything. Her fingers tapped softly here, more insistent there, the notes laid upon each other or hammered out as she remembered pieces of conversation. She wanted to record it all. Or let me come closer, into a place where there is a magical fireplace. She laughed aloud, the sound of it in harmony with the music she typed, Or to a place where there is cereal left on the stair and I have hours upon hours in this magical, fiery place. She continued to play, her fingers aflight, the room and it’s chill forgotten. She was warmer now.

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