#Laurie byro

[florriescreamlagoon]

As a daughter roaming the world, I wept for a mother sorely missed, raising the flowers as she had, never leaving a city window unadorned, without a box full of geraniums to tend.

I was a mother forsaken, I searched for her among the starfish, behind the sandy dunes all the way to Provincetown and back. This earth has no use for mysteries. When I finally caught her in my arms, a butterfly needing no net, I bargained with the lilacs, the heart-shaped leaves, the bees to let her be mine, be me, grow up safe.

Oh, but you will know the end to this story. Winter was waiting for us as certain as each wishing star would tumble, would hide itself away from our greedy eyes. She was borrowed, same as I was to make this tale complete.

Laurie Byro

[eunoiareview]

Pocket Watch

There is a limit to being needed. I’ve been slipped in and out of a waistcoat, a lover in honeymoon sheets, only reliable

if my tip is fondled. I am important only if I function in the tick-tock beat of the world. Oh, to be useless, a wild orchid in a field,

ornamental or at the most, romantic to bees and squirrels. Please, keep me in mind as a well-oiled tool, but don’t drop me

in the treacle.…

[fluttering-slips]

DETAILS            Before I make up the forest I fill it with pheasant, with a curious moth, apples and pecans, and a wandering serpent (who later becomes a troubadour) I mop the forest floor, I hang curtains in trees, I string cranberries and popcorn in the limbs of the hemlocks above. This is before the blight, before thunder and lightning. I pick your pockets, I brush out your blond pony tail. You take off everything but your argyles. I hang your pocket watch off its long fob, directly over our heads. I kiss the pulse on your neck. I want to say a word, a phrase, but we haven't studied Socrates. I'm not even sure if we've invented him, truthfully. We are consistent with soft rain, with peacocks, and conch shells. We scatter sea glass. Of course there is a tortoise, of course there is a hare. But there are words you are afraid of, in between sighs and cuckoos, in between green mountains and hovering dragonflies. All the lanterns we have strung, the grinning monkeys, the silver slip of a moon. You touch my lips with your finger and tell me “no” You thrust and sing. The pocket watch swings back and forth rhythmically dropping minutes.

Laurie Byro, The Melic Review Roundtable

[florriescreamlagoon]

From the north the winds lie long and light slants differently this time. I stick October into a socket of bone, read just its broken arm. I howl beside the goldenrod along these cliffs, startle finches into flight. Ragged feather dusters of cattails rove between their shoulders.

The air is yellowed with dust. I carry all of her there, a mosaic of stones and fragments of bones, a skeleton key with no door to open. She is the lazy strain of lost shells, the deep green and copper rust of the body. Climbing down nine flights of stairs, sometimes chasing the light.

I lay her down among the tall grass. She is the flinty spark off a match I cannot strike. A gingham dog tears at my father’s hand, laps his last slurp of water. I lie to the man who wants her ashes to mingle with his. I tell him I have saved all of her for him. I want the sea to take back all of my mistakes. Carved and thick as a pane of old glass the tide sweeps the beach. It picks through stones with crooked fingers of salt.

The tide, they tell me, will be coming in soon.

Laurie Byro

[florriescreamlagoon]

There is no mirror in Jerusalem.

Before my mother had a hole cut into her belly,

before she got the cancer that hissed and snaked

through her insides, I told her about Mary who

was a beggar I had met on the streets of Jerusalem

all those years before. Mary, sometimes

as she was able, apprenticed to stitch doe-skinned

cloths that held coins off her neck. She had hundreds

of soft pouches filled with talisman stones, or crumbled

frankincense. Mary, long before my mother, had a wound.

She would open her robes and allow strangers to put

their fingers into her bloody pouch. It made me think of sin

or something. My mother slyly told me, her Mary

was different. That the Mary I met had been crazy with Jesus,

wild-eyed but not holy. Mom said Mary was probably not

a virgin, and definitely not anyone’s mother. She may

have been the heavenly hostess of coin-filled pouches,

in God we trust. This was Thanksgiving in 1989. Tonight,

when the night concentrates on its breathing, when the stars

kisten to hear if there is a moral to my story, I have no Mother

to tell it to, no wounded mother to argue with. I want to

say it straight. There are no stories in Jerusalem worth saving,

no souvenirs worth keeping. All the mirrors have gone

to rust. These stories, I so urgently tell, are the new old lies.

Laurie Byro

[florriescreamlagoon]

I thought that birds were Gods, small like me—

but confident in what they knew they could do. I never

wanted to be a dusty home-cawing rook. You asked me

once which one I could become. You had in mind

Briar Rose. You never were one to notice small miracles,

the soot on my forehead when you kissed me,

the burned cinders I play with, the bitter residue.

I’ll write you back tonight, then maybe never again.

The stutterer who owned the tree farm now

sells Christmas wreaths from a half-acre his rich cousin rents.

I pricked my finger on the wild rose bush you dug

up and dragged to my house while he slept off a drunk.

Nothing comes without a price you told me. I tore

my fingers across the sides of those cat-claw roses

to conjure you back, just like you threatened I would.

The chanting in my head couldn’t fill the plate

at our plain wooden table. Morning doves pick

at the bloody-tipped seeds I offer up again and again.

I wait for them to sip my blood, to herald your return.

My fingers are raw but as you warned they are not scarlet

angels. Even the cardinals have fled and abandoned us

for Mexico. Tonight I will give us another chance.

I look for a sign of fiery shadow-birds among the cloistered

branches. I remember how you burst into Nessun Dorma

when you wanted to be holy, a snatch of Hallelujah

to awaken our dead with an offering of the everyday.

Laurie Byro

[eunoiareview]

Ashes

Ashes http://wp.me/s14SZX-ashes

I thought that birds were Gods, small like me— but confident in what they knew they could do. I never wanted to be a dusty home-cawing rook. You asked me once which one I could become. You had in mind Briar Rose. You never were one to notice small miracles, the soot on my forehead when you kissed me, the burned cinders I play with, the bitter residue. I’ll write you back tonight, then maybe never…

[eunoiareview]

Why I'm Not a Monk

Why I’m Not a Monk

I like to talk. I contemplate while I talk and people say I sleep-talk. I like the appealing collar, the lace around the sleeve. I love epaulets. I like the little details. Once, while I was about to climax (in the wrong place, a closet, don’t ask) I stood among the shoe horns, the winter

coats and bit my shirt to stop myself from crying out. I worried (not that we’d be discovered) but that I would

[eunoiareview]

Cinders

Cinders http://wp.me/s14SZX-cinders

While growing summer days, I picked the roundest pumpkins, just in case, and I begged the cat not to chew

the black and tan piebalds since they make the swiftest horses. Still the rose bush that pricked my finger sent

me into some kind of a spell: blood poisoning, sepsis, who knew? The men from the pipeline warned me

about tetanus, those hot days I’d stop the car to chat about progress. But that…

[eunoiareview]

The Fruit of the Dead

The Fruit of the Dead

The only story I ever believed in was my own. The only disguise I took was an old hag, crone-breathed and foul, and now it has abducted me. When I leave

my gowns and veils I turn into what I blithely imitated. I am fully realized. I am a daughter traveling the fires, I am a mother redeeming myself in corn. I have become

my own story, I left it and pieced it together as it needed us to change. I…