Laurie Byro's short stories and poetry have appeared in a dozen or so small presses. Additionally, her work has been published in The Literary Review, Single Parent, Redactions, Aim, Chaminade Review, Chronogram, Grasslimb, Re:al Journal, The New Jersey Journal of Poets, Red Rock Review, The Paterson Literary Review, and the 7th Quarry among others. Her work can be googled on-line and in the Guardian Unlimited workshop. She has been thrice nominated for The Pushcart Prize and has won or placed in 36 IBPC competitions. Her work was published in The Poetry of Place Anthology (honoring William Carlos Williams) in 2009 and 2010. Her children’s poem “A Captain's Cat” has appeared in Cricket Magazine and a textbook Measuring up to the Illinois Learning Standards. Her first book The Bird Artists was published in 2009 and Mayor Barra proclaimed Laurie as the “Official Poet Laureate of Allendale, NJ.” Her work draws on myth and fairytale and her experiences of foreign places in the years she worked as a travel agent. Her poetry insists upon the continuing importance of fantasy, mystery and “the other” in our lives. Laurie is head of circulation at a library in New Jersey where she facilitates a poetry circle.
Winter 2012
Table of Contents - Vol. VIII, No. 4
Poetry Translations Fiction Non-fiction Reviews
Laurie Byro
First she gave me her loom, Goddess and human,
we each went to work. What can I tell you about
her that you don’t already know? She silenced
them into believing that hers was brightest, she knew
many Gods and some gave up their wares, acorns
were mashed into dyes, birds sweetly molted their
blues and greens for her. She conjured each trick
while I, with no magic, wove. Then she said:
“Behold this world Father has created. These rivers
churn silver and gold, these trees drip diamond raindrops.
Now, Father is a man who doesn’t skimp in his abundance.
I sprang from his brain, fully armored and ready
to take on this world with no thought of women’s pleasures.”
Which leaves me, not a Goddess, trapped at my loom,
creating a life in my tapestry. As her colors spill out and she
reveals herself to us, the dusty road she travels, the burning
bed she falls into exhausted each night, I am forced
to live an ordinary life. These luminescent threads call me
back to myself, weaving me and binding me into my own
spidery world, yet she is the one to whom the frogs call out
their strange vowels, summoning her further from the city.
For Helen Brusco
I try to talk her out of herself, telling her she will have
no adventures like the others, that her whole life
she will sit on a plain wooden throne. It was written
I will have all the fun, I shall raise honey-scented
anemones each spring, and when my daughter finally
comes running, I shall make a bargain to keep her.
Other times, as Another, I implore with my grey-eyes
flashing, I shall initiate battle, and usually I shall manage
to give them what for. Remember those nasty men
on the hill, I ask? Who would suspect, not them, that
in the end, I would win. Helen, I say, I know for you
it is winter, the stars are hidden, but did I ever tell you
the story of how I was wooed by two men, and neither one,
a lesser God? And think how the underworld would spark
your imagination. She remains unconvinced, peels
potatoes for supper. I tell her more, she always listens.
She lights the candles; the flames are a beacon. She hums
as she brings the bread she has baked to the table. I shock
her with my other lives, all the deceptions, the changing
back and forth to human. In my Artemis guise, I try
to convince her of the abundance of nature. In high summer,
dragonflies teach us about safety and risk, but scare
us with their shifty garnet or tourmaline eyes. Each month,
according to our custom, we women form a circle and tell each
other stories. Wise old Mother, she sweeps the kitchen floor,
braids the hair of one of us, tucks a handkerchief into
the pocket of another. The hearth is ablaze tonight,
it makes the stars all but disappear, it has made us all
go silent. Still we form a circle with her always at the center.
Still we manage to continue even when she is safe at home.
© Laurie Byro
