Founded in the fall of 1991, Laurel Moon is Brandeis' oldest, national literary publication. Each issue we publish features original work from undergraduate students.
i’m the protagonist of a low-budget movie my casting
agent says i’m not talented enough to drop. father’s
killed off in minute five & mother’s a widow with a costume
of goodwill’s finest black. she downs holy water to summon
a ghost that never comes but the director still foreshadows
how we will forever be haunted, worries we won’t win an award
for best horror. to help, i spend the funeral in the bathroom,
seven & solemn, a the sixth sense copyright. viewers jack it
to trauma porn but turn away when little boys cry, so on the toilet
i sit & fold airplanes out of two-ply. they don’t make it
off the ground. in post-production, i realize i am trying endlessly
to erase my name from the credits, re-exporting the .mov file
to no avail. my therapist is a film critic who reminds me i don’t have
to view my life in 140p quality, but i’m too zoomed in to see
brother replaying an open casket full of what he keeps behind
his closed bedroom door: a spider’s web for warmth, a watch
forever stuck in ’06, splinters crafted to penetrate skin, an elixir
he pours over open wounds but mostly down the basin of his throat. brother
knows how to manipulate footage. bad lighting, wind, jump cuts, a shaky
hand wrapped around the underside of a toilet in the movie premiere
bathroom. alone, i find something salty leaking through the bottom of my popcorn.