A Treatise on My Ignorance, in which I Wallow Happily, Blissfully

I know enough to admire the beauty of:
            uneven spaces on a page; punctuation creating patterns, creating ways, creating
            paths; repeated words, implied sighs, colors contrasting on screen, on printed page,
            between the white of the eye and the rest of it; someone else’s music in someone
            else’s car, growing louder as they come nearer, growing fainter as they drive away,
            the singer’s words never clear—lyrics I’ll never know to a song I’ll never hear again;
            the upstairs neighbors running around, upstairs, jumping around, yelling, composing
            together a noise that is singular; a joyful noise not music made by people I do not
            like at all.

DeMisty D. Bellinger, a Wisconsin native, has an MFA from Southampton College and is now working on a PhD in English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. In the past, she has volunteered as a reporter for Milwaukee’s Riverwest Currents, written columns for the Lincoln Journal Star, and contributed to Lincoln’s Star City Blog. Her fiction can be found in Diverse Voices Quarterly, LITSNACK, Wilderness House Literary Review, Touch: The Journal of Healing, SpringGun, The Monarch Review, and NAP. DeMisty enjoys reading and studying working class literature, women’s literature, and African-American literature.