The Reader
1 Minute Read Time
“Don’t date a lot of boys. It’s better far to marry
your first love, like I did,” the gray-haired woman said.
The teen girl scoffed at this advice; she longed to carry
out what she thought to be a full life, rich with varied
experience, like in the novels she had read.
And so she dated many boys and did not marry
at all, and sad guitarists sang her wild unwary
heart, her tangled hair, her hot impulsive head.
The girl basked in their singing and went on to carry
on love affairs whose bitterness was legendary,
that ended in glass shards and horse heads left in beds.
And when she’d had her fill, she thought at last she’d marry,
for wedded life and childbirth, too, have literary
worth, featuring in many novels’ central threads.
And so she found a husband who was proud to carry
into their house his bride whose interplanetary
picaresque past just proved she’d tried and risked and bled.
They raised a girl and boy. And they stayed happily married.
She never spoke of that one throbbing scar she carried.
Read more from Issue 17.1.
