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Living in the Body of a Firefly
by Laurie Byro
Second Place Winner, InterBoard Poetry Competition, August 2008
Cotton mouthed, hung over, I wake up in my sooty dress
somehow ashamed to be seen in the utter waste
of daylight. The barbecue with all those mint juleps
on the verandah was intense but I strayed too long on the edge
of a glass. I long for a quiet train trestle, wood and paint
chipping off, not those city lights where I am one of millions.
I'm not fooled by the low murmurings of the river,
cattails to luxuriate in, but danger in the deep-throated
baritone of frogs. Damselflies are entirely self-involved
and bossy, known to eat out of their own behinds. Never mind,
there's safety in numbers. A neighbor has an easy split
in a porch screen and as I'm on a tear of wild nights
before I die, I've set my sights on their cathedral ceiling.
In the sway of tall grasses his youngest cups her hands
around me to pray. I am coveted in the moist chapel of fingers.
Tonight, I'll hang around until they are all half lidded-drowsy.
I'll skitter down to her favorite blanket where she'll wish
upon me like I am the last star falling, the last creature on earth.
Judge's comments: I was engaged by this character who wakes in the waste of daylight in her sooty dress, partied out, smoked over, yet dreams herself a firefly leaving the city lights to be a light in the country, caught in the chapel of a child's cupped hands, a star falling to her at night, a fairy wish. Better that than to be a damselfly, "self-involved / and bossy, known to eat out of their own behinds." It's magical, and utterly romantic, or more accurately, Romantic, in its division of life into innocence and experience, country and city, childhood and adulthood. As a critic I read back in grad school critic said, "Romantic poetry is a long walk into the sublime, and a short walk back." Who can really write a Romantic poem today and get away with it? Something about this poem's assured movement, its magical images, its tenderness, allows me to like it, because there will always be a Romantic in poetry, and the only question is the one that the moderns (especially Frost, Williams, Yeats, and Stevens) posed themselves: how to renew the Romantic impulse in a world in which the machines have won and the country has retreated to city parks and potted plants? -- Tony Barnstone
Snake Song
by Laurie Byro
Honorable Mention, InterBoard Poetry Competition, September 2008
I was never intended to be unique.
Dawn appears as a shapeless cloud opening up
the path and I believe in the world beyond
my vision. Every dreamer is different.
Some seek sunlight, some seek shade, others sleep
in a starless night. In the witch grass a mate
slipped me out of my coal-grey suit. She cleaved
a blanket of ghost-skins. She belonged to me
and not the earth, and we dissolved from flame
to ash. Her truth is as flexible as her spine.
In high summer thousands tangle with the wind.
We are the wild braids on a mother's head.
We whistle our death tunes through the bones
of fallen sparrows. We feast on the banquet
of morning as the sun strikes the day like flint.
I am not the lowest of creatures and yet
I haven't been blessed with wings. I will not
entreat the trees to rustle their goodbyes
and cover me in leaves. I won't beg shivering
stars into harvesting wishes on me. My blood thickens
and sets. I shrink again into the crimson ground.
Wolf Dreams
by Laurie Byro
I wasn't sure what he wanted of me; the ice
in winter birches had made the forest slouch
into spring. All that winter I peeled
and sucked papery bark for the sweet taste.
I recognized him from his red tongue,
the furtive runs when I entered his dream
and we crawled along the forest floor, repenting
the dark. I had nothing to bargain with,
no deal to make him human. The night
was filled with briars and salt. In the summer
the air became thick with honeysuckle, slick
with mating. Beetles droned in messy beds
of clover. We slunk along, weeds stroking
my belly. I hadn't yet decided which life
was better. Grass combed the plume of my tail.
The nights were crystal sharp. I waggled
my slit high, what was left of my breasts pushed
into a pile of decaying leaves. Who cared
how many and how often, I was not entirely his.
Eyes of owls glittered in the sleep of trees, tree frogs
sang in a green-robed choir. The moon clamped
its yellow tooth into my shoulder. I took the whole
night inside. What was to become of us? I had
packed away my white Juliet cap and veil for just
such an occasion. I held him like a warm
peach in my palm, longed for his juice to run
down my chin. Most nights I didn't care about
the names they gave me. I held my fingers
out to him, felt the tug as my ring fell off, carried
my limbs down to the entrance of his den,
planted a birch just outside his home
as a token of my loyalty. I was free
of the chains of consequence. I gave birth
to his amber-eyed bastard who without hesitation
he devoured. When he becomes old and says
he always dreams of me, I shall make myself
a meal of him, savor his voluptuous tongue,
and suck all the bitterness from his bones.
He will not make such promises again.
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The Bird Artists
by Laurie Byro
When my skin no longer fits, I carry a bag of bones
to the edge of the ocean. I steal the breath from a gull.
On the beach a mother bends to help a young boy
bundle up a baby cormorant. I watch as they cradle it,
hold a wing into the air and fling it eastward.
I thought you could teach me how to fly. I made you
out of sand dunes and red clay. My husband sleeps.
I conjure up you, Merwin, and you, Merlin.
Palm trees and ancient words, a black cauldron
of seawater and fire. You spread the fan of the cormorant's
wing and arrange your pigments and brushes, stroke
each feather with woodland brown or green.
I feel my skin begin to loosen. I pick away the lice,
curl back the sclerotic welt of paint.
Long afterwards I knew she had entered
my house, not as a scavenger,
a buzzard or a gull, but as a wagtail.
She cocked her head and studied me
as I hung blue sheets on the line. The silence
and fluttering I’d loved as a child had polished her
a lustrous yellow. Lot's wife could be dissolved
into a night of salty stars but what to do
with her? In feverish August I willed snowflakes
on my skin to ease the summer heat. I warned
her to leave us for exotic Africa, chanted
your name as idle sunshine buttered
her wings. I preened myself to prepare
for my late migration from jealousy to song.
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Pilgrimage
by Laurie Byro
Tonight I make my winter journey. I cross the ice
to kneel at midnight where stars shiver and fall.
Without light nothing will grow. A thousand years
ago my brother climbed an ancient cedar to bring
down a paper nest for his sister at Christmas.
Under the moonless mask of night your lush mouth
opens. I feed you snow. Candles flicker in the cheeks
of each ruddy saint. I need you to help me return
to the place where I dropped each pebble from my pocket
to make sure I would always be found. I am lost
among dark angels. You made me keep my poems
away from death: will poetry now keep death from me?
Still voices call as yours once called. Without you
I fail. Your vixen trails her blood scent home.
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For WS Merwin
A pile of windfall apples becomes
a fox lying nose in tail, a sentinel for memory,
as the late sun turns its fur into rusty barbed wire.
We've traveled for days. I've told you before
about these mountain roads. About the man
who lived in a shack who borrowed water,
fried me a plate of catfish for my Halloween
treat. I called him Uncle Charley, but he wasn't
any relation of mine. The night we got caught swimming,
there was another who wore a hood, leafy and torn,
who watched with particular interest while I wrung
out my undershirt, scrubbed my skin pink before we
sat down to supper and I was forced to eat what
was good enough for them. What I thought I had left,
I kept finding again. A pile of hoods in our attic left
behind by the man and bleached white as bones. Clippings
of the pineys and the baby who had been stolen.
We find a fox lying nose to tail, a sentinel for memory,
sun glinting its fur rusty and I tell you, with lips bruised
like wind fall apples, I can't stay here. Me with my old
coat mended so neatly where I had sewn secrets into its
pockets. Me in my little girl's voice who tells
you a story with lips that are only slightly torn.
When I crawled through my mother's bones
I'd like to say, they were bent over me
like birches, that the tips of her pelvis-march
scraped against me in that narrow place.
But babies aren't made this way. Beauty is messy;
the dark box I return to just before I wake
is a field with a thatched cupboard, every kind of leaf
as if she collected me among these pressed wax
paper plates. I'd seen tall, holy trees in Muir Forest
and me on my swaying stem, a Lady's orchid,
her newest treasure, swaddled and given
up to her in a room with open windows. Crushed
yellow and scarlet autumn hands reached in
and settled on our laboring bed. Rust ripped the sheets,
they'd call me an autumn flower. Candles sputtered
and grew down, white and pure and healing.
Each relative and ghost was there. She cradles me.
She holds my soul over a flame. This life is messy,
Mother. I carry your bones in a paper sack
like a picnic lunch. When I release us
to the air we tumble like acrobats, blister
the hardened earth with our fall.
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