by Lauren Tivey

At fourteen I’m enamored of the macabre, drawn to darkness, musical and otherwise. My friends are still listening to Shaun Cassidy – all that wholesome blond pop – which leaves me restless. One winter’s day my newly single hungover father takes me to a record store in Nashua, New Hampshire, tells me to pick whatever I want. A raised eyebrow over the Blizzard of Ozz album cover, with an ominous, long-haired Ozzy, satin-caped and straining on a derelict attic floor, a strategic placement of cross, skull, and horns, but my father buys it for me. Some guilt involved with the divorce and all, say the bags under his eyes. Gray afternoon light permeates the plate-glass windows, and the record rows gleam. It’s a hallowed church of metal and angst, and I’m a fresh convert. The register rings, drawer slamming open, and cash exchanges hands. My father never gave me much, but he gave me this. Misery, bursting into bats. 

Lauren Tivey is the author of four chapbooks, most recently Moroccan Holiday (winner of The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize 2019). Her full-length collection, Traveler in the Sunset Clouds, and her hybrid poetry/photography collaboration, Fire Carousel, were recently released by Main Street Rag Publishing Company. Her work appears in Connotation Press, LETTERS, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, and Grimoire. She teaches at Flagler College in St. Augustine, Florida.