Another Estate Sale
Gravel showers the windshield
of pollinated pick-up
shining bed and body black as the bible,
my body in the passenger seat frail as
faith. Forest fires rage on up north, but
not here at home.
The shroud of truth covers me with
second-hand smoke and my second-hand
dress, embroidered pink sparrows fraying
close by the collar, birds,
stitched by the steadiness of a human hand—
swooping underneath the cirrus
of my sternum.
White dress yellowed as a marriage license,
or a love letter kept in its coffee-stained envelope.
Objects in mirror are closer than they appear
I am warned from the passenger side.
I watch the grass that surrounds
the graves grow
as we circle the cemetery,
just driving the dirt roads to
talk about tomorrow.
I cannot bear to touch
the shape of my shadow, nearer than God to me.
I have a cheap golden heart
I wear around my neck.
It turns my throat green,
itching allergy to self.
The hole I keep your fading face in—
a locket
or a coffin?
I click it closed.
Checking my frills
in the lacustrine silver
of rearview, I exhume your goodbye
from the glovebox like a crucifix,
use it to ward off the dusk that trails
the truck like a thin hound
teeth bared, barking into the exhaust.
I am afraid as any other animal.
I roll down the window.
I’ve worn this chain,
with its hearts and crosses, medals of saints,
since it appeared on my nightstand
as a little girl, and now I and toss it
into the wafting
summer gloam.
There is only one wish—
again.
Dwarf Planet
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
My mother’s milk is space dust, its own element.
I suckle mercury, and it makes me into an alien.
I speak a language nobody knows
and never grow up.
After the nightmare, my hand over my heart.
In the dark, I mistake my own
arms for Saturn’s rings.
Outside the window glass,
star-spat cloud buds into bright flower,
petals blue as Earth.
I ellipse the black garden like Pluto,
harvest Hiroshima ash into my apron.
The grasses whispering their griefs to my ankles
as if they could fell me like a fawn
take me out of the trap and make me their god.
Maybe I could make it rain all the time.
I use the water as a mirror,
comb the uranium out of my hair.
I would like to believe in tenderness.
The moon is no one’s wife—
she is a white-knuckle, an empty hand.
The moon is a fist.
There’s radon in the well water.
It has already killed a calf
and wasted my body.
Bedridden with War,
the sun, that hairy lioness, catches my fevers.
Or moon is my death mask. I know her name.
she throws the sea over her shoulder like salt,
pockets an infant’s caul in her night gown.
There is no loneliness like longing.
Every constellation as an effigy,
candle-lit by nebulas,
all distant as saints.
Every face you see in a dream is a face you’ve seen before.
Laura Ingram is a young poet who lives and writes in rural Virginia. Her work has previously appeared in over one-hundred literary magazines and journals, among them Juked and Gambling the Aisle. Laura is the author of six collections of poetry; The Tafeta Parable, Junior Citizen’s Discount, Mirabilis, Animal Sentinel, The Ghost Gospels, and the Solitude of the Female Preying Mantis. Laura enjoys most books and all cats.
Chantarelle's Notebook 