—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.

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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.