Mont Blanc by Andrea Caswell

My lover bought me a Mont Blanc pen
As a gift for my 23rd birthday.
He was much older than I was, knew about the passage of time. 
He saw that I was afraid of becoming a writer.

We drove alpine roads in his silver Citroën,
Spent weekends at a chalet near Chamonix.
We studied the moon’s surface through his telescope, 
Bathed beneath its lunar glow, named kittens after stars.

The pen was smooth and black, a fountain pen 
with a metaphorical point of white snow on its cap.
I didn’t marry my lover when I had the chance, lost
track of him in time, lost the pen in one of many moves.

Dust has settled on my wanderings, and thirty years later,
I keep thinking the pen will resurface, bubble up 
from the bottom of a box to claim its true place in my hand.
My old lover, I wonder if he can see how I search now, 
how I use other pens to conjure word-spells. How I search 
for meaning in these constellations of letters scattered like stars.

Artist’s Statement

I think of writing as a search-and-rescue mission. I write to uncover what’s been lost to memory and time, and to discover what I might make of the remains.

Andrea Caswell’s writing has been published widely in print and online. Her work has appeared in Tampa Review, River Teeth, The Normal School, Columbia Journal, Consequence, and others. She holds a master’s from Harvard University and an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She’s a fiction editor for Cleaver Magazine, where she’s on the faculty of the Cleaver Workshops. In 2019 her fiction was accepted to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. A native of Los Angeles, Andrea now lives in Newburyport, Massachusetts. She can be reached at www.andreacaswell.com.


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from A Short History of Dance by Marjana Savka