About the Book:
Longevity is a book-length narrative, a fictional prose poem told in fragments about the protagonist’s relationships with the women in her life and the deaths of those women: her mother, her best friend, her sister. Longevity is told in reverse, starting with the present and working back to the birth of the younger sister, which was the beginning, for the speaker, of both memory and loss.
Read an Excerpt:
Featured in Oct/Nov Issue 2015: Read Global
THE LONGEVITY OF BONE
And the waitress said, girls, grits is like grace.
You don’t order it, it just comes.
Me and my sister Margaret.
Sun took us out of purple shade into yellow noon.
Gaggle of turquoise-breasted children waddling by.
Ocean flat as fresh-pressed cotton, palm trees quiet in the August heat, pelicans I love and live with diving blue from sky to sea.
Far from the ground of my snow-bound childhood.
My sister looks beautiful.
Orange shift shimmering in sleeveless breeze.
Fashion, in its extreme ephemerality, escapes from Time almost as completely as the eternal and the Absolute.
The present. The body. Its extreme ephemerality.
In my family we think everything to do with the body is in the mind.
In my family we think the mind is all that matters.
Meantime, the stock market went right back up again.
The Longevity of Bone from Longevity ©2015 by Laurel Blossom. Appears with permission of Four Way Books. All rights reserved.