The Good, Pure Sound                                                                                           

#First

Long unremembered now is the name

of the bar where we met her that first

and only time. Palest bottle blonde,

indigo baby skin, thick soft trunk

oscillating an explicit mezzo purr.

Piloting canny exchange with her acolyte

—green as chloroplast—over tidy goblets

and immaculate cocktail napkins,

inches from our brimming chaos

of smartly lipsticked Prosecco flutes,

urgently rattling ice cubes, ruins of terrible

delicacies fringing chipped little plates,

and half a dozen swarming black ashtrays—

a crucible of nicotine volcanics,

briskly managed from the altitude

of our nail-thin Olympian egos.

Four of us that night, all thirty-three

that spring and revved like fuchsia Vespas

—sprinting to the imminent zenith of forty,

grand threshold of imagining our ravenous

femininity would transfigure into long awaited,

long-feared release from venal enchantments

with time, ambition, and too much coiled-up

talent ruthlessly expended on sex

and its terminal byproducts.

Braying across the banquette,

we dragged our chairs closer, bit by bit.

Till at last we shoved the tables together,

our parties conjoined like women at

a treasured water pump in the bush,

so consumed in chorus we barely noticed

how near we’d been to begin with.

#Next                                                                                                                         

There is a thing you see in women

who have long since left the place

we believed we were headed.

They eat the world alive

and thrust it back in a gust of furious

detachment. That night we bathed

in the penumbra of a creature who

nailed our hubris more shrewdly than

we dared admit to ourselves. You must

abdicate everything, she said, that is not

of and for your craft. Till you are

mediocrity’s bane, distant as Sheboygan

from a Borealis star.

Every song is a story, she said.

We tell as many as we can gather.

To give ourselves, if we are

the only listener, a dignity of privacy

in the good, pure sound. And for

them who might hear you in the street

below your window. We learn the stories

to become what we cannot otherwise.

And tell them newly as our bond with

the sound daily reinvents us

from belly on out to feet.

Our clinking glasses stilled,

she whispered:

When you master a story for yourself,

it is second nature to sing it

for them who come to hear you,

and you alone, tell it.

#And Then

I thought I knew Angel Eyes.

Years coaxing it into a signature hook,

my throat gorged like a greedy marquesa

hoarding too many of the same cut

of brooch. But when she turned to me

(Sing me a story, love), I shrank.

I’d let the story go soundless

as a desert lacuna.

So, sinking to the gritty floor I told

it whole, first time since the story,

and the man, got away.

I can still feel the wine-stained old varnish

imprinting my knees like intaglio.

When the last note of ‘scuze me while

I disappear rose in unbreakable knowing,

she leaned back into the chair, whispering,

That’s it. That’s all there is. And if there’s

more, it’ll find you. Sing it or not, it’ll find

you, and finish you at last.



—A Room of Her Own, November 2025