Founded in the fall of 1991, Laurel Moon is Brandeis' oldest, national literary publication. Each issue we publish features original work from undergraduate students.
At the comic book shop where you work
a man comes in later than anyone would reasonably
buy comics, and spills his armful onto the countertop.
You scan barcodes steadily so the only sound is
what could be your heart rate monitor in half time,
and the cicadas hurling their pleading wing-voices against
the glassy ether. And then the ether, bouncing them back.
The man wants to know
what's there to do for fun around here
and you want to say not me
certainly not me.
Here’s the point in the story where
I imagine the eyes he fixes you with
blue and seated reluctantly
in his face like moviegoers who realize
they’re in the wrong theater but stay
to watch the film play out.
After it all,
when the door seals him out
into the still-uncooled night where he marches
back to his car, then toward the next state line
back or away
you’re standing with your fingertips pressed against the table
perhaps thinking about endlessly driving endless roads.
You told me once that if everyone you loved died
you’d become a truck driver and let the miles
of window-framed nothingness whip into the cab,
into your ears and eyes.
Here is what I wish I had asked then, seeing the tripwires
you were setting for the darkness in you:
Down what mirage-rippling, crystalline-deep
road were you staring, already,
when your late-night customer
licked his lips (not in the way you feared
but in another fearsome way)
and you could feel his confession poised to leap,
or perhaps just to fall from a great height,
acceleration warping
its small droplet of weight
into a blade
big enough
for both you
and him
to stand
beneath?
Peter Fray-Witzer is a student at Oberlin College studying Comparative Literature and Creative Writing. His poetry has been published in Oberlin College’s Plum Creek Review and Two Groves Review. He is from Lexington, Massachusetts.