As a library assistant, I stuck the first three letters of an author’s last name on the spine while stuffing a ham and cheese sandwich in my mouth in a room filled with National Geographic’s from the 1990s.
I spackled a Wilkinsburg woman’s bathroom ceiling, sorted piles of used bridesmaid’s shoes in a non-profit consignment store and yanked out forests of corn stalk-tall weeds in beer-can-filled vacant lots.
I annoyed Westmoreland businesses by asking for their addresses and phone numbers. Nihilist waiting music to get to the reception desks of ski resorts. Sharpies that blacked out the names of closed sub shops. Post-It notes with updated websites of drive-in theatres in illegible blue ink.
I spent my nights hunched over my computer in my dorm room drooling like Pavlov’s dog. While I masturbated to Dostoevsky, my unpainted toes pushed up against my forgotten biology textbook.
- Morgan Boyer
Morgan Boyer’s work appears in Rune, Wilderness, House Literary Review, Linoleum and The Critical Point. She is the winner of the Marilyn P. Donnelly Creative Writing Award for poetry in 2017 from Carlow University. She lives in Dormont. Many writers featured in Chapter & Verse are guests of Prosody, produced by Jan Beatty. Prosody airs every Saturday morning on WESA 90.5 FM.
