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Laura Minor
The Open Window on State St.

I think of the Russian woman who stayed in my loft,
. sleeping naked on the fire escape with a blur of a man
who’d wandered into the party. She left a star
. on my inner left ankle with a needle and a small pot of ink.
That night, we took turns laughing at the last line of coke
. between us, how, it looked like the common whiteness of every mug.
I can still see her shrugging from the window of that empty loft,
. where we got up games of whiffle ball, led by our roommate,
a drunken dilettante half-studying the law.
. Extraordinary women unpack themselves
like dirt around water. She was one woman,
. and not a mother or friend to me for more than a day.
But she reminded me of Ama, my old friend,
. whose name is an Italian conjugation for love,
a friend who wears her burden with the weight
. of St. Augustine’s confessions—
and at night her eyes are up-turned umbrellas in wind.
. She lives on the Florida coast, and there is something
wild inside of her that slips out and eats
. the blue algae pickling the ocean’s edge.
Ama looks into its infinite faces
. with more muscles than winged Samothrace,
still composing her short story, which she believes
. will be famous for its silver sands.
It’s in her name to transition
. past the collapsed attic of her years,
to slink away from being a walking vagina to men,
. unworthy of what still counts of her possibilities,
or a lightning bolt, or whatever else the world
. tells a woman we must be. Our mothers say
with no sense of their irony:
. You have to be your own cheerleader.
And that’s the worst part: to jump in one place
. breaking the same patch of dirt, over and over.
But there was that Russian woman
. who visited me on State St., how she climbed
onto that fire escape, straddling it, brown legs
. hanging one on and one off, a lampshade
gathering all the light,
. then diffusing it to the earth below.
About the writer:
Most recently, Laura Minor’s poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming from Burrow Press – Fantastic Floridas, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Berfrois, Hobart, Spring Gun Press, and elsewhere. She earned an MFA in poetry from the Sarah Lawrence College and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in poetry at Florida State University.
Image: Roman Women at the Window by Paul Nicolaus (1904-1945). Aquarelle. 48 x 35 cm. 1935. By free license.