Love Letters From Lake Geneva | Sydney Wright

SYDNEY WRIGHT

It was when a scattering of ivy clasped my ankle behind the rotting willows that I was reminded of the loon’s shrill echoing across Lake Geneva.

Remember Shelley, when that poor girl you loved mopped her corset through the lake after chloroform cough syrup visions of stillborn blueberry lipped babes as motionless as the overbaked, sodden July breeze.

You said to me Byron, quit writing stories of hollow haunted love. For Mary is enamored by rotting organs and resurrection, blood stained carnations, and cancer. Cancer, sweet cancer crawls beneath Capricorn with her elongated death.

Mary, Mary, and her morbid magpie tune. Snippety snap the shredded strand of the pearl necklace you gave her slipped into a froth of moss and insects lost to the breeze.

We laughed and called her “Ophelia” as chestnut curls churned over the laminated lake surface.

You shattered her mason jar, lit not with the beating batter of fireflies fluttering, but with fallen follicles plucked from human corpse heads.

Bottled blonde wiry wisps that would have darkened with age, like the dusk skies when you reach further from the last traces of city light.

Babies bodies that would not be baptized in bolted lightning to breath and bawl into their mother’s bosom at last.

Shelley, I must say, Mary was too good for you and we know those poems weren’t yours.

Now I stare at the dusted glass cylinder with smudged thumbprints and a lip print? Yes, a stamp of stale lipstick embedded into the grime on the glass.

Through the hazy film I see the knotted fibers and graying tissue still, as water logged as the boat you sailed. Mary was always a better swimmer.

I’ll never forget her bony fingers scooping your petrified muscle that once bled deep beneath your chest bone - now solidified

in the sea’s grating salt. Every last fluid filled your lungs like the heavy satchel bags we used to carry.

Mary, Mary, and her macabre memories asked me where poets go when they die, and if the cobblestone roads were more stunning than the infatuation of their lie.

One day you rowed the wooden dingy, and left just Mary and me. She wept into a leather-bound journal, watering the ink that screamed,

Byron, I love you more