Your Story, My Story

by Connie Palmen

I could have said goodbye then, run from this story, fled from its writer, from the leitmotif of my character, listened to the voice warning me of the inevitable consequences, commanded by the logic of the plot, but instead I was sucked in deeper, attracted by the danger, irresistibly drawn to the siren song.

“Ridiculous” is the first word he writes. That day, stubbornly contradicting the lover’s howling loins, the poet writes that it’s ridiculous to call it love, that her absence feels like the wound of a man shot down who looks up at her after he is hit—at the bird of one note, one cry—then dies. “Loss” is the word with which he concludes his first poem for her.