"A Long Silence" by Paula Brancato
A Long Silence
It had been 20-odd years
since he and I had been close
enough to share a bed.
An old man now, decidedly old.
Not so much the gray hair, there was plenty of that.
Or the lines etched across his face, handsome in a man or so they say.
But bone old,
frail
in ways I’d never imagined any
of my lovers could ever
be,
when I was young
and thought
such men
were
gifts
specially made
for me.
Paula Brancato is the 2015 winner of the Tampa Review’s Danahy Fiction Prize and of the 2015 Booth Poetry Prize, and was honored to be the Second Prize winner in Cutthroat’s 2019 Rick DeMarinis Short Story Contest. Her stories and poems have also been recently published in, or accepted for publication by, The Interpreter’s House, Ambit, Kenyon Review, Mudfish, GSU Review, Georgetown Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Slipstream, Barrow Street, and Common Ground Review. Her first chapbook, Dar a Luz was selected by Ilya Kaminsky as winner of pacific Review’s 2007 Brushfire Award. Her second chapbook, Painting Cities, and her third, For My Father, have been published by Finishing Line Press. Brancato grew up in Queens NY, escaped early on, earned my MBA at the Harvard Business School and is a graduate of Hunter College and Los Angeles Film School. She has studied seriously with poets Philip Schultz, Mary Stewart Hammond, James Regan and Philip Levine. She has been a music industry CFO and Wall Street executive.
Joshua H. Baker lives in Oregon, where he works for the U.S. Postal Service. His writing has appeared in Cirque, The Opiate, Madswirl, and Foliate Oak, while his photography has been featured in literary journals, calendars, and on gallery walls. In his spare time he enjoys hiking and meditating at the beauty-and-refuse-rich seams between civilization and nature.