Laurie Blauner
Travel Agent
I’m waiting for someone to answer their phone. They want to visit someplace where the sun smirks for hours, where hills turn the color of spoiling meat at sunset, where grass churns in the wind. I pry an office window open to smell the nearby artificial lake with its odor of an old blanket. We are foreigners here and everywhere nature resides. We collect her souvenirs and make them ours.
I tell my tourists, The world is yours. But I don’t mean that exactly. Not until we scatter ourselves, merge.
They reply, Yes, certainly at that price.
I douse myself with the scent of lemon trees. Why not? It evokes a time of my many limbs being discombobulated. A past in which I scamper to remember olive trees, clear blue water, sinister evening shadows, bridges, vermilion rooms, eager beaches, brief lovers.
I believe in transformations, a place gulps you inside its people, streets, houses, and entertainments. Then it swallows. A life that claps its hands, kisses you every afternoon.
Someone called the other day and asked, Why not confront our loneliness, our lack of?
I’ve camouflaged myself as someone happy. My skin is tickled with music, my gestures seem more exuberant, and air ushers in my future. I sift through passports and visas, brochures and pamphlets. Once upon a time people migrated, shuffling from darkness into light, finding what they needed within their wandering. After seeing new places, some visitors want to go home, discovering that their nearest sea is more resplendent and their house is simply another way to live. Soon I will land in Iceland where the landscape is green until it’s not. Then it’s snow and ice again.
I simply wait, working on my perspective until there’s no need for any additional whims. I try harder, fizzing with your wishes, urging something new into this world or somewhere better.
Time Traveler
I used to be aware of every detail around me, the odd stomping of feet, an out-of-place rain, a person that seemed familiar, an ashtray in an open refrigerator. Now I try not to see anything until I’ve arrived. This travel elongates my body so I am tall, stretched, ready to slip through a questionable scene and land somewhere safe. I like to lean against objects and then make sense of them.
My youth is gone but what has taken its place is a far future. I discover a composite of orange trees with bent, ribbon-like trunks, a furious sun, a smoke-filled sky, a scaly, brown earth which might make a demand from me at any moment. I am always interfering. The perpetual question is: with what? This time I bolt and cuddle one of the trees which doesn’t hide me as it sways in a breeze. I flinch as a bearded four-legged creature sniffs and hurdles towards me, its ears alert. My tree undulates, puffs towards the beast’s glowing, yellow eyes. I don’t have time to learn anything. I watch trees bow until I am exposed.
Did I conjure you? The being asks without speaking.
No. I prepare to run. But that might not help me.
What can you do? It studies me, yellow eyes blinking.
I can move back and forth in time.
Are you a religion’s god or a worshipper?
Neither, I state and then I do run towards a bubbling purple lake.
The creature easily catches up to me. I leave for another time just as it leaps.
The Writer
An Interview1) Do words originate from you or do they find you?
I am right here. There are so many names for one thing. Inuit have approximately 50 words for snow and about 70 for ice. We notice slight differences in what surrounds us most and want to describe the differentiations. As I grow older, specific words escape me and find me later.
2) Is everything about writing?
I dream that stars form teeth in the dark mouth of the night sky which begins talking. The mouth says, Write this down. This is the story of my life. That portion of the sky is all of the sky to someone.
3) What’s it like to be someone else?
Bones are made from sentences, strands of wrapped muscles are adjectives, skin is the rind of expression and functioning is held inside. One glass of water can interpret sunlight in so many ways onto a wall. I’m awaiting each new experience.
4) How do you know when to stop?
I don’t, until a shape is created. It is a bowl that holds something I hope can someday live on its own.
5) What is your next work about?
A man named Fact that drowns in an ocean. The book is about his afterlife. What happens to his body, floating here and there, having its own experiences. While he also watches from a shore, creating another life in his mind, living in a field of lost light and wind where he meets other souls.
6) What do you have hidden in your sentences that a reader might not see?
Foreign phrases or syllables, some dillydallying, grass in darkness, limbs that echo or sing, a dream that throbs in the world as both a noun and a verb, armfuls of vowels, nooks and curves that go nowhere.
7) What are you afraid of?
Storms, parents, children, thoughts, a loud life, rain in all sizes, and the sharp surfaces of ghosts, animals, and words, where everything begins. Because there’s always more to say I metaphorically look both ways before crossing an allegorical street.
Inventions with Afflictions
Blood inside the door and I can see his peculiar outline sitting in a chair against the corner of his dark room. He doesn’t move, even when a large spider descends from its web onto his shoulder. It’s as if he is frozen, this man born once without afflictions and then born again with afflictions. He opens his mouth slightly, perhaps to speak, but then closes it again.
Finally there are words, spreading like dandelion seeds, in the heavy air. Don’t turn around. My invention is now behind you.
Using my hands, facing him, I sit very slowly in the overstuffed chair. I rest my briefcase, guilty with brochures, figures, and contracts, against my legs. A soft noise, like a chugging train or some kind of a machine recalibration, leaks out behind me as I stare straight ahead. I try to determine his clothes, a long-sleeved shirt, pants, thick shoes? Are you here against your will?
No.
Why am I here?
But he doesn’t answer at first, only stares past me at whatever it is I can’t see. Don’t worry. But I can’t tell whether he is speaking to me or what is near my back. The room is silent again. I want to begin the speech I tell all my clients who have created something deemed of interest by my supervisor. I’m thirsty though, and my mouth is useless.
How did you invent this? I finally inquire.
He motions to whatever is behind me, an invitation, a smile. I’m suddenly gathered and the man disappears. I’m held aloft and I remember my toothsome laugh in photographs with my son, now living with his mother, and the appearance once of a Biblical dust smothering the small town I left. I’m set down in the chair the man just occupied. I understand there are indulgences and punishments available for each particular body. I suppose I will discover them all as I take his place and finally look.
Laurie Blauner is the author of five novels, nine books of poetry, and a book of hybrid nonfiction called I Was One of My Memories. Her latest poetry book, Come Closer, won the Library of Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander Press.