Victoria Bosch Murray

This really happened. Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway when she was three months pregnant, six years his senior. My sister loved quartz when she was still alive. There’s no saying what she loves now. Pink quartz is beautiful. Paddy’s is a midshelf whiskey. Most of the sand is gone from the beach, the result of relentless undertow, a distant hurricane. His wife called me. Distance is commuted by the speed of light. Or is it at light speed? Whiskey takes over, at least for awhile. He took me to his secret spot, a cemetery with a quartz headstone overlooking the ocean. Or a river that empties into the sea. A graveyard. Drinking whiskey straight from the bottle is ill advised. No one knows why. His wife is on the phone. I power wash my deck, water and sand painfully. Distance is commuted. Here’s what really happened: I was asleep. He woke me with his fingers. Some say that Shakespeare wasn’t forced to marry Anne but that he wanted her, touched her in a way that can’t be undone, like a man with long arms reaching across the restaurant table and putting a hand on my chest, almost above the soft flesh of breast. In here, he says. In here. Pink quartz is beautiful.

Victoria Bosch Murray’s poetry has appeared in American Poetry Journal, Baltimore Review, Booth, Field, Greensboro Review, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Salamander, Tar River Poetry, The Potomac, and elsewhere. She also has a chapbook, On the Hood of Someone Else’s Car from Finishing Line Press. She is a contributing editor at Salamander.