BEFORE HE LEFT ME
I do not want to be anywhere else. I want to be here lying in the divot of my mattress, listening to the rhythm of your breath. Now the rhythm of your holding your breath and the aspirant exhale and the search for more breath.
I do not want to be anywhere else. I want to feel the heat radiating off you and melting my anger, my resentment.
I do not want to be anywhere else. I want to feel the oiliness of your skin: the pimples that caused you so much pain and self-consciousness as a teenager. I want to accept the hills and valleys of that teenage landscape under my quiet hands, to help heal them.
I do not want to be anywhere else. I want to hear the fog dripping on the skylights and see in my peripheral vision the fingers rapping at the windows. I want to feel the counterpane of your warmth and breath and aliveness beside me.
I do not want to be anywhere else despite the accumulated piles of half-worn yeses, smelly no’s and damp maybes. Despite the years of quiet and not so quiet resentment.
I do not want to be anywhere else…
I want to be lying here, right now, in this very moment, in this bed, under this marriage, where it is warm.
October 15, 2015
Harriet Garfinkle Word + Image
Jump in
Artists - Fine Arts
I am querying.
My short story 'The Ghoul and the Gunslinger' was published by Open: Journal of Arts and Letters.
I won third place on the Effie Lee Morris writing contest in The Women's National Book Association - San Francisco, 2020 for 'Someone Else.'
My short story 'Hyperbaric Chamber Orchestra' was published online in Conglomeration No. 9 of The Conglomerate. 2020
The opening chapter to my novel, entitled 'Someone Else' can be read at a publication of the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley, RiverSedge
Two — count 'em — two stories published in Gris-Gris Magazine, Online Journal of Literature, Culture, and the Arts from Nicholls State University in Louisiana : Fast Forward/Slow Rewind
and
In 2022, I received Effie Lee Morris awards from the WNBA-SF Chapter, winning BOTH first AND third places— imagine if I had entered three pieces!