My State
At daycare, she says, Sue serves us spoiled eggs.
Oh, you mean boiled?
No. Spoiled. And I don’t like them.
Later I ask Sue, who elucidates, Scrambled.
In the parking lot, we talk license plates.
Mine has a loon, she explains,
And yours is green.
Yes, yours is a loon because you’re from Maine.
Yes, Grandma, but I’m from License Plate too.
I squint into space,
trying to imagine the state of License Plate,
but find a mind of scrambled eggs.
*
Someone
I once lived on a great wide river,
a time of deep aloneness, after loss.
How soothing it was to watch waters passing,
sunlight reflected in circular currents,
a white moon cresting
above the shadowed mountain.
I miss the river, though not
the hushed quietness of that time,
the endless plumbing of depths
I never guessed, which nonetheless
led me to choose—a wife
calling me from another room,
as she is now, to come downstairs for tea,
steeped to the color of the river.
*
Laura Foley’s most recent collection is: It’s This (Fernwood Press, 2023). Her poems have won many awards and appeared in many journals such as Alaska Quarterly, Valparaiso, Poetry Society London, Atlanta Review, and included in anthologies such as: Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems, and How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope. Laura’s poems have been turned into choral music and performed in venues such as the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and Carnegie Hall in New York. She lives with her wife, Clara Giménez, and their two romping canines, among the hills of Vermont.
