The Blue Woman
- The Blue Woman
Seven years I worked in a bank that lacked windows, weather, shadow.Soundproofing wicked at my soul while a screen hummed indifference.
But one midmorning from somewhere I heard a sound—neither tap-tap nor whirring—it was, instead, a single thin
tinkle, another: a melody played on keys of a toy piano,tinny and small, but enough to make my heart hurt, to know
I wanted more. I willed the song larger, filled it with daydream:a garden, full summer—a fruit-bearing, beautiful tree—music
enlarged past containment; that's when I knewI'd walk out the door, blank as a sheet freed for scoring. [End Page 107]
Johanna Hayhurst, who lives in the Berkshires of northwestern Connecticut, received her MFA from Warren Wilson College in 2001. She has had a fair number of poems published in magazines over the course of the past several years. She won the 2002 Morton Marr Poetry Prize for Southwest Review, won a 2005 Award of Honorable Mention from New Millenium Writings, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for poems published in Prairie Schooner, and had her poem Daphne cited in two collections: By Herself, Women Reclaim Poetry (ed. Molly McQuade, Graywolf Press, 2000) and Fruitflesh, Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write (Gayle Brandeis, HarperCollins, 2002).
