Harrisburg
By
Paul-Victor Winters
Say I’m easily lost. Say it’s mid-June, Harrisburg
. The man will leave as he came, hazy spot on the proverbial horizon,
speck on an otherwise relatively clean record. Why record this?
And why love? Say the man is a shy songwriter gone addicted. Or,
skip the introduction and cut to the chase. Say there are three
men where there ought to be two. Say one is a kid on his way home
to a backwoods father with liver disease. Say the kid leaves early
one morning without leaving a note. Bless mid-June nonetheless.
And bless Harrisburg . Why menthol cigarettes? Or Oldsmobile love-making?
Call it indirect characterization. Call it plot development. Call
it a crying shame. Bless the tremor in the left hand. Why Xanax
kisses in the rainy Pennsylvanian moonlight? Why guitar picks floating
in the toilet bowl? What, now, is left? The man getting ready to
leave. And me, already forgetting the details, already ready to
quit Harrisburg cold. One man where once there were two, three.
And a tremor in the left hand, lost keys in the songwriter’s
Oldsmobile. A spilt-open steamer trunk full of spiral-bound notebooks.
And a highly-flawed narrative structure.
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