BRAZEN — LAURA RELYEA
/There’s a picnic blanket in an otherwise blank room and you are laid upon it reading. It’s here that I know I’m in your shallow square pocket. Later, again, when rye and bourbon have made us a bit awry, conversation turns to social dynamics and I realize – I’m an oblong, surreally smooth stone you hold in your calloused palms as you drive. A totem oblivious of its own benefit. How without this Africa-shaped talisman your shoulder will cramp halfway between Mississippi and New Orleans, somewhere in the bayou. My thoughts potter a buck shy of five hundred miles.
What if I fell out of your shallow pocket in transit into the passenger seat of a woman’s black car? You have no intention of buckling in again. Reeled in, I am a spool pulled taught, preoccupied by the fading memory of a blue linen shirt that reflects the sky everywhere and two unopened bottles of beer in the door of my refrigerator. What is it to unwind – the contents of a sunroom bleached? Oysters scrubbed for shucking? A levy, in want of a hurricane?
I am everything, including coy.
Laura Relyea is a writer in Atlanta. She's the Managing Editor of Scoutmob and the Editor and Chief of Vouched Books. Her work has been featured in Necessary Fiction, Monkey Bicycle, Coconut Poetry and elsewhere. Her chapbook, All Glitter, Everything, was released by Safety Third Enterprises last October. She both fears and respects Glitter.
