​Where are they now, those fictional people I spun up out of thin air and set free? I miss them: Clara and Mallie and William T., The Bartender and Tamar and Crystal. I miss Will, lonely boy wandering the streets of LA, leaving kindness in his wake.

My people live in an invisible world parallel to ours. Sometimes I’m able to coax them through the scrim. Sometimes they fill me in on their lives. Sometimes I wish I could change things for them, but they are their own selves now, and they get to be who they are. I wish I could have them all over to dinner, make their favorite foods, tell them how much I love them.

Fictional Characters, by Danusha Laméris

Do they ever want to escape?
Climb out of the white pages
and enter our world?

Holden Caulfield slipping in the movie theater
to catch the two o’clock
Anna Karenina sitting in a diner,
reading the paper as the waitress
serves up a cheeseburger.

Even Hector, on break from the Iliad,
takes a stroll through the park,
admires the tulips.

Maybe they grew tired
of the author’s mind,
all its twists and turns.

Or were finally weary
of stumbling around Pamplona,
a bottle in each fist,
eating lotuses on the banks of the Nile.

For others, it was just too hot
in the small California town
where they’d been written into
a lifetime of plowing fields.

Whatever the reason,
here they are, roaming the city streets
rain falling on their phantasmal shoulders.

Wouldn’t you, if you could?
Step out of your own story,
to lean against a doorway
of the Five & Dime, sipping your coffee,

your life, somewhere far behind you,
all its heat and toil nothing but a tale
resting in the hands of a stranger,
the sidewalk ahead wet and glistening.

Click here for more information about the wondrous poet Danusha Laméris. Today’s poem is from from The Moons of August, published in 2014 by Autumn House Press.
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