Medusa

Bryan D. Price

 

the dog goes under the bed stays there awhile I don’t know what she does down there but it’s cool to the touch I guess she needs it maybe she’s down there dealing with the DTs the devil ahold of her soul you don’t have to tell me this is ridiculous but sometimes I think that you inhabit her (and at other times the cat) they have your eyes tired and heavy and ready to leave the earth and then I closed my eyes and saw you looking not unlike medusa wrapped in a blanket or shroud and absolutely filthy as if you had just come from the bottom of a lake with no socks on your feet and your hair was long and plaited and slick as snails you asked (perfectly deadpan) why we painted the house so dark and why we got rid of your furniture and why are we still childless and what am I doing for a job and why I paid a guy (two guys really) to redo the floors instead of doing them myself like you had hoped and then I think that the future is something that can’t be imagined as unimaginable as Elizabethan times or Tomis at its most nocturnal and bleak resurrected only in these fragments of time before a dream sets in when notes of parting are composed

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Bryan D. Price’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Posit, Diagram, Hinchas de Poesia, and The Shore. He lives in Santa Ana, California where he is working on a manuscript of elegies.