Open Mic Night is a spoken word event on the first Monday of each month at 6 p.m. at the Ada, Oklahoma Public Library.
Who might find this notebook in 100 years and toss it aside as garbage? Who might dig up this book in a cave in 50,000 years and build a faith from it?
The Taste of Your Tears
by Richard R. Barron
(I once asked her to send me a vial of her tears, telling her they would have special powers, but she never did.)
I still recall the taste of your tears.
Since your death, so many of the things I loved about you have been sullied by who you really were.
Only history can judge us, but I know your pretty face and small hands will make room for your pain, your hatred, your fear of the worst things you said and thought.
I remember dozens of Pam-Am 727s parked at Albuquerque the week I saw you there. I could smell the Jet-A waft across the tarmac, the smell of failure for Pam-Am, and, I guess, you and me.
No one was ever as lonely as you were. Not even you.
Who loves unhappiness? Why did it seem impossible? It’s been done! I’ve done it!
But no. It was impossible. You and I were you and I. It wasn’t our time. I held you close in 1992 because I wanted it. You held me close in 2022 because you wanted it.
So I ugly-cry huge, wet tears of regret at losing you, knowing how beautiful and beautifully flawed we were, and always would be.
So goodbye.
Wasps in the Lamps
by Richard R. Barron
“Honey, why don’t you go lie down for a nap,” she asks.
“Because I want to stay here with you,” I answer.
Later, as I stood over the sink, scrubbing as my mother used to, I looked out the kitchen window and thought about all the times I wanted to stay there with you.
I use a stiff plastic brush on the globe of my hurricane lamp, trying to remove the residue from the acrid black smoke that coated it when a red wasp, doing the only thing it knew how to do, flew into the lamp, finding the wick and immolating itself without regret.
Black soapy spots splatter my glasses, and I wonder what it would be like to have such a pure purpose.
