Danielle Beazer Dubrasky
Moving West
So many rectangles in this house—the couch, the doorway, the transom
above the entrance, the wooden coffer topped with a voluptuous ceramic vase
an old boyfriend bought for me from a Boston vendor. He bundled it in newspaper,
then a paper bag, strapped it to the back of his motorcycle, showed up all in black—
leather chaps, jacket, sunglasses. We steamed clams, dipped them in butter, while we sat on rotting wicker in
a screened back porch and a cooling storm blew through. I laughed about
the vase, his hair wild from the storm, his new job as a roadie for Aerosmith—
their “Permanent Vacation drug-free come-back tour”—but he got fired at Christmas and
called me drunk and crying though by then I had found the man I would marry,
the one I first saw standing in the alcove of my new place in Utah, Friday night—
I’m watching “America’s Most Wanted.” The landlady had told him,
She never goes out, she’s always alone. He showed me the Pleiades, Cassiopeia,
Mayfly nymphs under rocks of a landscape spun purple, turquoise, ecru, colors of a desert
that has supplanted everything, though a screen of rain shows through the glaze.
About the writer:
Danielle Beazer Dubrasky directs the Grace A. Tanner Center for Human Values and is an associate professor of creative writing at Southern Utah University. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Chiron Review, South Dakota Review, Ninth Letter, Main Street Rag, Pilgrimage, saltfront, Cave Wall, and Terrain.org. In 2017, Red Butte Press at U. of Utah published a letter-pressed folio of her poems called Invisible Shores; and her chapbook, Ruin and Light, won the 2014 Anabiosis Press Chapbook Competition. She is a two-time winner of the Utah Division of Arts and Museums original writing competition in poetry.
Image: Village in Utah by Gregor Perušek (1887-1940). Oil on Masonite. 26 x 28 inches. By 1930. Public domain.
