She kept the television on all
day,
all night, the first year she
lived
alone, without husband
or father. It glowed in its own
room, where she rarely visited.
She never really listened to it
talk
to itself, repeating the news
of its day. She only needed
to know it was there, carrying on,
another voice in her otherwise
empty house.
That was then. She’s learned to love
the darkness, or at least not
to mind the setting of sun, and
can
do without the flickering
screen. She’s
learned to navigate by touch. Still,
the voices she can’t do without:
crawling into this wide bed, she
listens
to the team and lulls herself to
sleep
with the comfort of the roaring
crowd.
Anne Britting Oleson has
been published in such journals as Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Cafe
Review, Cimarron Review and many
others. Her chapbook, The Church of St. Materiana, was
recently published by Moon Pie Press. Anne graduated in 2005 from the University of
Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA program, where she met up with the four
marvelous writers with whom she founded Simply Not Done, a women's reading,
writing and teaching collective.
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