I Go Back to September 1979

The Enchantress shows up to a Vails Gate dive called Something Else in a see-through shirt of metallic magenta at 1:00 AM, trailing fireflies, white teeth, and attar of rose and patchouli. She offers no explanation for the more decent hours of her evening, what prey and predators she had already battled. She sits and crosses her endless legs at the bar next to a man with curly coal hair and broad shoulders. He seems rural, kind, with innocent eyes the color of robin eggs. She is ready for kindness. She is ready for shoulders for all she cannot carry. She is thirty-two, her youth spilling out of her like a garden hose left running on the lawn. She does not tell him about her two kids. She does not tell him about her fragile car or her moldering walk-up or how she barely quit welfare. Instead, she spins her theories of the world like so much cotton candy, reveals her grimoire of culture—Broadway and Monty Python and Updike—showing her vocabulary, seeing if her magic impresses. She has a drink and a smoke with this new possibility, lays down her car keys strategically in front of him with a sly smile so he can see the rubber fob, a half-eaten cookie that says, “Eat Me.” He awakens from her spell forty-five years later, only after she dies: his thousands of glistening amber days stacked in their house like fox pelts.

Lori Rottenberg has shared her poetry, flash, creative non-fiction, and poetry reviews in many journals, anthologies, and even podcasts, most recently in Literary Mama, Tupelo Quarterly, Mid-Atlantic Review, december, Pleiades, and Viewless Wings. She received Honorable Mention in the 2024 Passager Poetry Contest, one of her poems was picked for the 2021 Arlington Moving Words competition to appear on county buses, and she served as a visiting poet in Arlington Public Schools for over a decade. She holds an MFA in Poetry from George Mason University, where she teaches writing to international students and poetry to Honors College students.

A Song for Lori