Committal

Abstract

Committal Michelle Lesifko-Bremer (bio) COMMITTAL For Steve Dixon Sweaty, rushing from my fourth-floorbattle with the albatross copier, I spillcoffee down my skirt taking the stairs and remember you, rushing into our basementworkshop, tea sloshing and having sloshed,all right, we're all here, might as well start— I use dashes to punctuate dialogue often nowand to stretch the limits of a conventionalsentence, you'd be glad to know, or probably indifferent, given that you approached teachingwith the same weary resignation as a waiteror cab driver or beat reporter, probably because you'd gotten used to those kinds of jobsbefore you told me, bluntly, that my love storywasn't believable and no one serious writes the phrase like diamonds in the rain,not even a poet, and probably I shouldn't writeabout marriage until I'd been in one— and wonder if my disheveled teaching personacan possibly be as charming as yours, decidingno, probably not, since ours is a dry campus, no magnums of Yellow Tail to end the semester,no pound cake, no typewritten comments on the backsof old drafts—and even though you were dying [End Page 555] of Parkinson's, I imagine you writing every day,stories interrupted by phone calls, still typingin the rundown house with the scrappy black cat who seemed as exhausted to be alive as you were—just sentimental nonsense, like the fiction I wrotewhen I was eighteen, a girl's dream of a man they call a writer's writer, but who seemed to metoo sad to be anything more than honest,shaking his head saying just write the damn thing. [End Page 556] Michelle Lesifko-Bremer MICHELLE LESIFKO-BREMER completed a Bachelor of Arts in Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University before completing her Master of Fine Arts at the University of Florida. She is originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she completed post-baccalaureate writing courses at the University of Pittsburgh, and currently lives in New York City. Copyright © 2021 Michelle Lesifko-Bremer