The Choice

by | May 15, 2012 | Poetry

 

 

 

 

 

 

Remember what I told you on the way back from the bookstore?

I want to remember, but I don’t.

You don’t? I wrote it down after I watched you from across the room. There she is, and I’ll be dead soon.

What are you going to do with that line, besides use it for a poem?

I don’t know. Sometimes I wish I could choose falling in love with you.

Why don’t you?

Maybe I can. You are so joyful. A goddess. I just wonder what would happen to us over time. I would never want us to end up like everybody else.

How kind of you to flatter me as you reject me.

Remind me again why I have to choose?

Because you’ll be dead soon.

 

 

 

 

 

 


Photo Source: Hamed Masoumi

About The Author

Vanessa Blakeslee

Vanessa Blakeslee’s work has been published in The Paris Review, The Southern Review, and Green Mountains Review, among many others, and her short story “Shadow Boxes” won the inaugural Bosque Fiction Prize. She has been awarded grants and fellowships from Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, and was a finalist for the 2011 Philip Roth Residency at Bucknell University. An alumnus of both the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ conferences, she also earned an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts.