"I have a mandolin, I play it all night long, it makes me want to kill myself" -—The Magnetic Fields by Seth Tisue | Flickr |
She wanted to write a song.
feel and was born to write and play it.
performing in front of people.
from bed.
she could open her eyes at any exact
minute and more often passed the entire
night pacing the villa of her imagination
in the nude and moonlight.
bedside because all little notebooks are
black and once in awhile she wrote in
hers.
ceiling above her bed the manic languid
lyrics that visited her during the act
of love.
months.
voicemails of suitors as encourage them
to knock directly on her door or better
yet to go and find her out wherever she
might be on the town or in the park or
down by the docks which is what one
should do when one has something
pressing to say to a person who needs
to hear it.
didn’t want to spend the money.
fives and tens and twenties tossed into
her open instrument case whenever she
played in front of small but emphatic
audiences who often died at her feet of
revelry because she didn’t play for those
fives or tens or twenties but for the dead.
late high school and early college.
megafauna to their knees by strumming
an arcane cord of Pythagoras’.
assignment with death the deadline.
raid the underworld unsalted, looking
wherever she pleased.
anything happening, anything at all,
are so long and so unlikely the
universe should not even exist.
Dan Tremaglio’s work has appeared in various publications, including Gravel, Literary Orphans, decomP, and Thrice Fiction, and been named a finalist for the 2018 Calvino Prize. He teaches creative writing and literature at Bellevue College outside Seattle where he is a senior editor for the journal Belletrist |