Get Cara Losier Chanoine’s writing
in the FREE PDF file
2013 poetry chapbook How a Bullet
Behaves
You can also order this
as a 2013 6" x 9"
perfect-bound paperback ISBN# book!
Click on the cover spread
for the book How a Bullet Behaves
Hero
Cara Losier Chanoine
When James Taylor was on Sesame Street,
he had a moustache like my father’s.
He was singing about smiling, and that
was it for me.
James,
at four years old, I didn’t know yet
how many sharp edges you had,
just that you sounded like the way
warm laundry felt on my skin.
I loved you with the fierce platonic worship
of a child.
As I got older,
you were as much stability as I could ask for
in someone I’d never met.
I held out hope that you’d work it out
with Carly Simon, and tried to figure
how someone could come back from your kind of damage.
My four-year-old self felt the betrayal
of the affair with drugs that landed you in rehab,
but my adolescent self was beginning to understand
that kind of pain.
James, I was twenty-four the first time I saw
your bones and skin pick up a guitar onstage,
and it was the kind of magic no magician
would betray the secret to.
I waited twenty years to see you walk across that stage,
and savior might not be the right word,
but it’s the first one that comes to mind