Renée Owen
Before the Rains Break
As kids, we felt lucky to get a swim in a strip motel pool with algae, half-way up I-95 to visit the Blue Ridge cousins. Squabbling on the long back-seat drives, car seats sticking to sweaty legs, our mom doles out melted candy to keep us from setting Dad to hollering. Now, dragging cross country with all my post-college detritus, I land in the swamp of a New Orleans summer. Grocery stores with near-empty aisles, busted jars, swarms of flies. The clerk says, Oh, its summer, honey. The locals head out of town for somewhere cool.
down the avenue
I circle the block of litter-strewn streets on my mission—arrive before grad school to find cheap housing and a roommate to split the rent. Lurking Victorians sit like grumbling painted matrons propped in front of tiny “shot-gun” shacks in the alleys, built to house the servants back in the day. Pulling up to temporary digs, a borrowed basement apartment, I struggle to park the U-Haul. Before my key tumbles the rusty lock, I’m covered in sweat. Not a curl of air stirs the tall maples drooping with dead leaves.
notes of a jazz horn
Inside, sad shabby furniture and dusky listless heat. What have I done, just to outrun it all. Divorced parents deep in the bottle, a boring boyfriend’s proposal, hard partying childhood friends, everything stuck and stale. Determined to settle in this upside down town, I sit between the crosscurrents of three dirty fans. Burn my tongue on a too-hot tv dinner, crack open a cold Dixie beer, launch the cap across the room.
casket dressed in gold
About the Author
Renée Owen’s award-winning books include This One Life (Backbone Press), Alone On A Wild Coast (Snapshot Press), and Scent of the Past … Imperfect (Two Autumns Press). A psychotherapist and an exhibiting visual artist, she enjoys performing her poetry with her musician husband and hiking the wilds near their Northern California home.