—for Carolyn
Some Sunday, you’ll be eating slices of toast,
maybe an orange, your face sticky,
happy with honey on a back porch
when something will peel back—
the scent of burnt leaves,
that cold you find toward the end
of September beneath layers of heat.
You’ll notice crumbs floating
in your coffee mug, a dog hair
in the sunlit honey pot.
Know that it’s ok, then, to think of her
years ago, sitting on a papered table
in a doctor’s office, her fingers
tracing the scar on her chest
as she slowly unbuttoned her shirt.
Laura Lee Beasley has a PhD in Creative Writing, Poetry from Georgia State University where she worked as an assistant editor at Five Points-A Journal of Art & Literature and was the poetry editor for New South. She teaches English and creative writing at the University of West Georgia and has worked as a copyeditor for St. Martin’s Press. Among other publications, her poems have appeared in The Split Rock Review, Silk Road Review, Apple Valley Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Stone, River, Sky: An Anthology of
Georgia Poems, and in Time You Let Me In, an anthology published by HarperCollins and edited by Naomi Shihab Nye. She was selected as a semi-finalist for Nimrod‘s Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry and as a Special Merit winner in the Comstock Review‘s Muriel Craft Bailey Contest, judged by Marge Piercy.