Tonight's Poet Corner: The Raconteur
The Raconteur by Belinda Roddie If I gave you my story, would you wrap it up in brown paper, or tuck it under your bed for safekeeping until it collected dust? Would you stick it in the bottom drawer, deep where the monsters can feed on it, teeth blackening from the trauma typed out in military text? If I read it out loud to you, would you turn your music up so that the bass hid every important consonant, so that all you heard was a slurred aria you could only pretend to understand? You see, I've written many stories before, but this one is specifically mine. It's got weathered pages and short chapters and sagas with run-on sentences and sloppy grammar. It has an unreliable narrator and subplots that never get resolved, and we haven't quite reached the climax yet. But if I gave you my story - if I let you leave your fingerprints on its weary, wrinkled face, press your lips to its spine, listen to the crinkling paper like it's a natural br