Landslide
by William Prendiville
She gave him “Landslide” when he was 16. The song, on a mixed tape, was sad and strange, and it woke a loneliness he hadn’t been aware of until then. Forever after, it assuaged the very same pit it created in his stomach. When he drank too much he never put it on, nor when he was hungover. When he gave all that up – the drink and the drugs – and had written her a long letter she never answered, that first ache, in his rehabilitation, came again like a blessing.
William Prendiville is the author of Atlantic Winds and ‘Love is Nothing but the Fruit of a Long Moment’. Other prose poems include ‘TS Eliot‘ and ‘Zbigniew Herbert‘.