Annie O'Hara Buys Singles, and: Medicine Bag
Rent from DeepDyve- Annie O'Hara Buys Singles, and: Medicine Bag
Annie O'Hara Buys Singles
Every week, she came with her allowanceto buy a Top Ten 45 at the Brooklyn record store,where I worked after college classes. Telling her secretas if we were friends, she whispered across the counterabout her one evening with John Davidson after a concert."We fell in love!" He was on tour, she wrote him a letterevery day, waited for him to come back to herfor the spring wedding she always wanted. I didn't ask,Does he write to you? The customer is always right.John Davidson could have any or all of the girls who waitedafter shows. This one had plump, pink lips, nails painteda matching shade, hair sprayed, the type of bodythat would spread wide, untamable by girdleor diet. And an innocence that made mefeel sorry. Like her, I was eighteen,my wedding two years away,engaged to the first manwho touched me. [End Page 125]
Medicine Bag
She's given up on booze, discarded statins,antidepressants, antioxidants, and probiotics,
returns to the old and the traditional—pouchfilled with the smallest personal treasuresof value to no one else. She starts with
the Three Sisters: one corn kernel, one eachof bean and squash seeds, adds a sliver
of quartz, acorn cap, tiny crocheted doily.She lays them out on green silk, like a bedof grass, asks what's missing, adds a heart
of polished snowflake obsidian, a bluebirdfeather, lichen curls on a twig to remind her
of cooperation. Then she sews a bag of softleather that will hold these talismans beneathher pillow. She swears she's never slept so well
or woken so optimistic, believing in the earth,air, water. Imagination about to burst into fire. [End Page 126]
Joan Mazza has worked as a medical microbiologist and psychotherapist and has taught workshops nationally with a focus on understanding dreams and nightmares. She is the author of six books, including Dreaming Your Real Self (Putnam), and her work has appeared in Valparaiso Poetry Review, the Mac-Guffin, Remington Review, and the Nation. She lives in rural central Virginia, where she writes a poem every day and is working on a memoir. Visit www.joanmazza.com.
