Annie Lure’s “The Interloper's Tale”
Annie Lure’s “The Interloper's Tale”
Curlew Friday Nights - July Eighth, 2022
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Decked out in a fox fur coat,
I fancy myself the rich publisher
of the hyperlocal magazine.
Do you live in town?
Nation’s Lending agent’s eyes go all rapey.
Yes, in the most transparent house. 64 windows lick my body gold each morning.
The fur was dealt to me by Russian puppet masters.
You have very long, healthy nails.
The fat realtor covets her neighbor.
Yes, they’re filed with Albanian cobblestones.
Frank, he’s the owner, and he’s not here now. Come back after 6.
In the pizzeria’s man’s tone,
I insinuate some Eastern uncle’s lechery.
(An obligatory internalized psycho-babble trauma trope shit.)
You won’t let me sell you ad space. Your ads are bound to aggregate in my magazine like
smuggling migrant trucks.
Why can’t I retrofit my silk, monied, foreignized dress to dumpy Lacey, the furniture artist’s
daughter?
Will the personal injury lawyer clinch my cunt on a mere technicality?
Can I drop my accent at the pawnshop?
This town isn’t mine. Though I live in it, I am not of it. I am somebody’s comprador.
I place the ancient woodsy Ararat elixir on the mahogany table wrought by the previous owner’s
good, hard-working American hands, and I drink its roots in like the baddest, blackest magic.
—- —-
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The line between poetry and fiction is a fine one, always bending and giving equal weight to the beauty of story-telling, along with the pleasures of word-play. Too much story and you’ve got a piece of flash-fiction. Too much rhythm, language and imagery without any narrative, and you’ve created a poem. Both have their gifts and joys, but something special happens when they combine their powers: a la, Annie Lure’s poem, “The Interloper’s Tale.”
I love the small moment ––– just one day out of an endless lifetime –––– that’s captured here. A rich publisher “decked out in a fox fur coat,” checks out a house. But not just any house; one that allows space for “64 windows [to] lick [the publisher’s] body gold each morning.” Clearly, it’s a stunning place. Though not nearly as stunning, I think, as the publisher. Said otherwise, anyone who can speak in “an obligatory internalized psycho-babble trauma trope shit,” has got my vote!
Isaac Myers III,
Editor
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Annie Lure enjoys poetry, erotica, museums, travel, and photography. She edits private clients’ monographs and publishes a hyperlocal lifestyle magazine. Poems of hers have appeared in Slipstream (Issue 36), Odyssey: Mediterranean Poetry, and Cider Press Review. She has read multiple poems at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe.
