"A Slice of Lourdes" by Tobi Alfier

A Slice of Lourdes

Lourdes lay in a hospital bed in some city between her beloved desert and the sea. She could hear the rain but couldn’t see it, nor could she smell any smells besides the sprays used by the cleaners. It was hard to breathe until they floated away from her, swirling on the ground until the next time. The nurses were brutal and spoke a language she didn’t understand.

Lourdes was bruised and sore as a ripe peach. Again and again, she drifted off to the heavy winter light of the Mojave. Late afternoon winds blowing rust like a penny fallen on trampled fields. Often she felt like a trampled field herself. Nothing to do but close her eyes and pray for the wind to end in star-sprinkled night.

Every morning she woke to stillness, an incoming tide, thoughts of driftwood floating from ships broken on angry seas just as she felt broken — a dinghy come unmoored from a rotted tether. She tries to name her room home, but it isn’t. Home is where he is, her liberator — gentle kisses, words with the buoyancy of seaside grasses, dreamy dreams, no pain to wrack the body into stillness. She cannot wait to go home, inhabit her own landscape, breathe untouched air in the waking light.

TOBI ALFIER

Tobi Alfier is published nationally and internationally. Credits include War, Literature and the Arts, The American Journal of Poetry, KGB Bar Lit Mag, Washington Square Review, Cholla Needles, James Dickey Review, Gargoyle, Permafrost, Arkansas Review, Anti-Heroin Chic and others. She is co-editor of San Pedro River Review (www.bluehorsepress.com).

Headshot: JC Alfier

Photo Credit: Staff