Shredding the Early ’80s

by Margaret Donovan Bauer

Embarrassed to have married him
in spite of what I’d written,

an effort to forget the man
he’d been when all that happened

and for the sake of children I
assumed that we would have,

I tore five years of journal pages
into tiny slivers.

I should have kept the journals and
thrown out the man much sooner.

A native of South Louisiana, Margaret Donovan Bauer is the Rives Chair of Southern Literature and Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina. In 2017, she received the North Carolina Award for Literature for her two decades as editor of the North Carolina Literary Review. She is also the author of four books on Southern writers, most recently A Study of Scarletts: Scarlett O’Hara’s Literary Daughters, but since that book, she has turned to writing a memoir about growing up in Deep South Louisiana. Read her work previously published in Deep South here.