2 Poems - Virginia Laurie

Storge

 My father breaks bread

with bits of rosemary

in it.

My mother put it there

for us, and oil to dip

it in.

I think I will fall asleep

with my head on

her shoulders

tonight, or we will swim

& August will have made

its quiet debut.

Oracle

We caught a glimpse of ourselves in the smoked vanity

mirror.                         [Eyes frosted shut and sewn up with black pigment,

we were dressed and ready for the coffin,        naked as a sheet.]

We felt the landing pad of the skin beneath our neck, the

sharp gullies there                   [I could feel myself purring like a cat, 

the apple seed in my throat bobbing.              You blew on it,

and I smiled indulgently,]

but my mind was somewhere else. 

      My mind was dimly lit and stuck just outside the window. 

My mind was rusty with menthols and incense,        [jasmine, China Rain]

still the loneliness stood crisp,                                   [fairy dust, 

frankincense]

and my heart stayed shelved. My thoughts 

could be easily divided: [useful]                   

    [not] 

And everything I said was college-ruled.      Everything I said fit neatly.

[bubble wrap dreams, and]

still the taste 

[of my words]

[secondhand smoke.]

Now I can taste everything between us from the neck up, all of it,

truths hissed against the helix of your ear,                 every-

thing 

we

wanted

[aged like milk.]

 On her process, Virginia Laurie: Most of my poems start as a line in one of my writing journals, which I try to keep up with, or, if I'm somewhere in public, a line that I jot down in my iPhone notes app to come back to later. 'Storge', for instance, is a very literal poem. I was at an Italian restaurant with my parents, and I was watching my Dad's hands, hands that are so familiar and recognizable to me, tear apart bits of rosemary bread which struck me (I was raised Episcopalian, so it's hard for me not to see breaking bread as something as holy as it is mundane), and I wrote the first stanza in my notes app. The rest of the lines devolved into summer nostalgia and the quiet, overwhelming surge of familial love (called Storge by the ancient Greeks) I felt for my parents as we all sat around the living room that evening, quietly, involved in our own tasks but together on August 1st. I wrote with Mary Oliver's quote in mind, "We all have a hungry heart, and one of the things we hunger for is happiness. So as much as I possibly could, I stayed where I was happy." When I'm happy, I write it down, so I can stay there later.