Storyteller of the Week

Laurie Byro

  

Laurie Byro has been facilitating “Circle of Voices” poetry discussion in New Jersey libraries for over 25 years. She has garnered more IBPC awards (InterBoard Poetry Community) than any other poet, stopping at 60. She began competing in 2002 and was named "Poet of the Decade" for work produced between 2000-2010.

A full length collection, New & Selected Poems by Laurie Byro was recently published. She did this herself through KDP Publishing. She had two books of poetry published in 2015: Luna (Aldrich Press) and Gertrude Stein's Salon and Other Legends (Blue Horse Press). A chapbook was published in 2016  by Wonder (Little Lantern Press) out of Wales.

 

She received a 2016 New Jersey Poet's Prize for the first poem in the Stein collection and received a NJ Poetry Prize for a poem in: The Bloomsberries and Other Curiosities by Kelsay Books. Laurie had a 5th book published La Dogaressa & Other Poems (Cowboy Buddha Press.)

 

"D'eux & Other Sorrows" by Cowboy Buddha Press, poems about Vincent Van Gogh and Isadora Duncan among others was published in 2019. Laurie's latest collection "Hopeless Romance" was published in 2021 by Cholla Needles Arts and Literary Library. Laurie was a travel agent for 24 years and a librarian for 14 years.

 

She has traveled widely, most recently Italy, Greece, and Provence and has used these explorations in order to write her "Salon" poems having visited the places these events took place. She refers to her Salon poems as "historical poetry." Laurie is currently Poet in Residence at the Albert Wisner Public Library where "Circle of Voices" continues to meet and Pacem in Terris, Warwick New York. She is proud to say her artist husband, Michael Byro, has created all the paintings that grace the covers of her books. D'eux has 8 pages of his paintings of Van Gogh in pointillism.

 

Comments by Editor Sharon Waller Knutson

 

Laurie Byro and I met on Verse-Virtual in 2020 and quickly bonded over our love of writing reviews and narrative poems, We frequently email and talk on the telephone to share our poetry and lives. She wrote a blurb for one of my books and I wrote one for one of hers.

 

I wrote this poem about Laurie that was in my book, Kiddos and Mamas do the Darndest Things.

 

Talk Me Off the Ledge, she says

 

with that wry laugh. I’ve had a bad MS

day and I’ve got cysts in my breasts.

What if the cancer comes back?

What if I don’t live to be sixty-four?

 

Everything will be fine. I’m psychic

remember? She calls back. My mammogram

was clear. I just published my eighth book

and I’ve got four cruises booked this year.

 

Back from the Caribbean islands,

she gets shingles on her neck

and ear. The doctor wants her

to take another mammogram.

 

But she’s going to the Bahamas

in March, France in April

and the Panama Canal in November.

Stay in bed, you’re dead, she says.

 

Sally is missing, she says on her cell.

My little girl went out last night

and never came home. Her brother

went looking for her and now he’s gone.

 

She says she and the neighbors

were searching all night. Someone

spotted a coyote near our house.

Those Siamese were my babies.

 

She wrote this poem dedicated to me in her just released book, New & Selected: Poetry of Laurie Byro:

 

Murmurings

 

For Sharon, who insisted

 

He's humming through the trees, lighting up the dirt road like a lightning bug--ever since he became a man of a certain age,

 

he is stunned by nature, most himself when surrounded by trees.

 

He hears his own heart throbbing through his chest, so I hear it first, a cacophony-wave down the road a ways. I am alarmed but he doesn't hear it, so busy pointing out each new scar in bark,

 

the face of a bear that appears like a stigmata on beech-flesh. "Nature doesn't cheat at cards" he says.  I am wary, he doesn't play cards, men of a certain age are strange.  The sound rises, puffs up, becomes

 

a billowing black roar of smoke from an ancient volcano or an invisible chimney. He sees them then, a flock of starlings murmuring, we may be at their mercy as they swoop and lift before us. Thousands

 

of starlings are swooping, somersaulting and whistling over our heads. He's vibrating with excitement, we both are. This winter river, this communication of wing and cloud, creates a dust

 

storm around us. He pulls me close, they tumble and race above, we are stones being smoothed out in a river of birds, in a mansion made of sky.  "Hush" he says trembling.

"With any luck. Maybe they'll take us with them."

 

 

She has referred to me in reviews of my book as the sister she never had. I see her as my second sister.

 

If any poet deserves the distinction of storyteller, it is Laurie Byro. I am impressed by her imagination, knowledge and creativity. Her poetry is magical and enchanting. I am honored to publish four more poems from her just released book, New & Selected, Poetry of Laurie Byro.

 

Poe Quartet: Jitterbugging with Mr. Poe

 

For Robert Milby

 

I jitterbugged with Mr. Poe

He wasn't very smooth in dance.

He tossed his raven to and fro.

And twice stepped soundly on my toe.

His hair took flight like Vincent's crow.

I feigned a faint, I irked romance.

I jitterbugged with Mr. Poe

He wasn't very smooth in dance.

 

I danced a waltz with Mr. Poe.

In dance he wasn't very smooth.

Akimbo steps, he crunched my toe.

His coif between Herr Pound or Moe.

In cha-cha love, he's rather slow. 

Romantically, he made no move.

I danced a waltz with Mr. Poe:

in dance, he wasn't very smooth.

 

1.

 

Poetoums

 

We loved with a love that was more than love. Edgar Allan Poe

 

This is my last chance to set it straight.

I shall not lie forevermore.

Mendacity seems to be my fate, as before

I shall summon my tell-tale heart.

 

I shall not lie forevermore.

A scribe earns his living by telling lies.

I shall summon my tell-tale heart as before.

Her loving came as no surprise.

 

A scribe earns his living by telling lies.

We were happiest by the sea.

Her loving came as no surprise.

I was beguiled by a trusting child.

 

We were happiest by the sea.

Her beauty was her darkness, I never told.

I was beguiled by a trusting child.

I was innocent and yet she made me old.

 

Her beauty was her darkness, I never told.

Mendacity seems to be my fate.

I was innocent and yet she made me old.

This is my last chance to set it straight.

 

2.

 

First Cousins

 

With the tattling of many tongues.  Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe

 

As a husband-thief, I knew you failed.

It wasn't just my youth that made him stay.

A bloody rose, a thorny love impaled.

With marriage laurels, I shall walk away.

 

It wasn't just my looks that made him stay.

He told me stories to help me fall asleep.

With marriage-laurels, I shall walk away.

It scares me a little, his darkness is deep.

 

He told me stories to comfort my sleep.

A strange love becomes a tender obsession.

He scares me a little, the darkness is deep.

Like a pocket watch, I became a possession.

 

With marriage-laurels, I shall walk away.

A strange love became a holy obsession

It wasn't just my youth that made him stay.

Like a pocket watch I became his possession.

 

A strange love becomes a lofty obsession.

A bloody rose, a thorny love impales.

Like a pocket watch, I was his possession.

As a husband-thief, I knew you'd fail. 

 

3.

 

Worry Moth’s Reprise: 

Virginia Clemm’s Consumption

 

The disease had sharpened my senses – not

destroyed – not dulled them. Edgar Allen Poe

 

Hers was not Sphinx, a pyramid, a Cloudless

Sulphur desert. She didn’t fall on her knees

Thirsting but rather hers was a wet boggy

Salt Marsh, a whorl world seashell Funereal

Duskwing. Hers was salt water taffy

 

pulled pink almost gone white, a tongue that

is coded and wrung, a Lily Stargazer

covered in the constant winged petals

fluttering.  All her lace collars with

complicated strings of cough were ferrying

 

her way her baby breath collars contained

one purple star at the center. Each cough,

each sputter on the piano, pink forming on

the ivories of her mouth, then dropping to

the keys, each bloody fingerprint

 

becomes a track led by Imperial Angels,

those frantic wings bringing her out of his

resigned eye further away. She’d been

named after a dead child, an older sister, not

a good omen. Leave your sleep, they begged,

 

stay with us awhile. But she was drawn to

the white candle’s flame,

her nightgown covered in powdery angels.

She wears them like a halo,

they guard her pillow every evening:

Plumed Lady, Blind Wood Nymph.

 

4.

 

Séance

I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity Edgar Allan Poe



I walked to meet you: ghosts like living beings swarmed around me and the moon like a sickle, slashed through the stars following us. Riding on a black crest of sky, you wrote me as in love with the sea. You wrote me innocent, a tender rabbit sniffing



at your curly sage, your sugar-laden clover. I am neither chaste nor frightened. The moon, a blue eye, knows the truth of us. You may write me as you will, you poets give yourselves airs, make omens of mere events. As we hold hands round the table, I am neither in this world or that, neither walking down the road to meet you or the air swarming around the lit candles. I am that moth:

Death’s head, a ghostly comet.

 

The Baker's Daughter

 

For Michael Minassian

 

They say the owl was a baker's daughter. Lord, we know what we are,

but know not what we may be.  Ophelia

 

 

When I was stricken by lack of Challah, not having the choice of yeasty brown or the crumbs off rye, I became astonished with the night and the flight of backwards or forwards. A wiggle worm was easy,

 

or a timorous mole, but the quickest snare of my grip, the rush of branch against deep dark green, made me know God. The hare turning its frantic eyes towards heaven, towards me made me seek

 

God. For then I was able to take or give back--Lord,

I had no business with raising the dead, sparing the lame. But when a burst of star blinded me in snowflake and hush, it was then I knew there are

 

other lives worth saving and mine worth remembering. A sweet crust, like a host would echo softly on my tongue. This ache was no match for a mouthful of scurrying mouse's feet, the life I abandoned was no sacrifice for what I am now.