Tag: Laurel Brett

Four Poems by Laurel Brett

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

THE BAY AT BAR HARBOR

A life of never sleeping—
insomnia makes living
a disease.

I take up residence
on the balcony of the hotel,
glass doors only mute

sleeping sounds of breaths
rising and falling, the benedictions
of my family, oblivious to the night

I spend sitting on the chair buried
in the bowl of stars,
the bay breathing

in the darkness, too.
Silver begins
along the crevices of dawn

opening the curtain
to a hundred tiny islands,
mirrors of the firmament

shining in the curve of port,
a school of swimming fish,
flashing fins— birth of the morning

of the world. I can never explain
to the sleepers the vision
before me,

or my wild exuberance.
By the time they wake
the silver will have vanished.

*

MIMOSAS AND MILKWEED

How can you not adore the earth?
To love is to press your cheek against the ground
and lie on your back to gaze up
through mimosa flowers
becoming birds against the sky.

The milkweed I planted for monarchs
returned this year, and bloomed
pink as a surprise— a prayer against extinction.

*

DEATH CAN NOT CLAIM DAHLIAS

I’d been mourning dahlias—
another loss.

You, my gardener gone—
poison ivy an invading army.

Dahlias demand so much—
tubers dug up in autumn

stored in winter       replanted in spring.
JoAnn gives me a mason jar

of dahlias. One owns my heart—
the color of midnight

if midnight were maroon       the texture of joy
if ecstasy were velvet.

Larger than my palm —
petals a portal.

*

IN MONTREAL

I get lost in the bonsai
in the Chinese garden
at Le Jardin Botanique

until I can no longer tell
if the trees are huge or tiny.
My restless children

beg to see Le Biodôme
nearby — four habitats
of North America.

We huddle in the cold, watching
puffins and penguins
in their fake Antarctica.

We swelter in the rainforest
room, where my 12 year old son
points out a capybara, a mammal

with a blunt brown snout. He
imitates Tim Curry voicing
an old cartoon, English accent

and all— a large amphibious rat,
and adds in a joyful voice
the largest rodent in the world.

Later at dinner the waiter,
insists my daughter is Italian.
Je suis américaine, she insists,

practicing her New Yorker’s glare.
They have outgrown my habitat.
The lady concierge explains in French

that whales will rise tomorrow,
their glistening sunlit backs
will leap up from the St. Lawrence.

*

Laurel Brett is a novelist, essayist, and poet. Her work has appeared in SECOND COMING, EKPHRASTIC REVIEW, ECLECTICA among other outlets. She lives overlooking a harbor.

Deer At the Hosta by Laurel Brett

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Deer At the Hosta

The deer never ate the hosta buds
before you died. Now they don’t bloom.

Hostas bloom so late in summer
I’d be impatient for white billows.

No dahlias this year without you either,
and the irises went haywire—

offering so few flowers,
and not the dark purple lit by apricot,

the fuchsia poppies
blooming now alone.

Back to the deer—
how did you keep them at bay?

They eat so precisely, headless shoots
remain on the flourishing plant.

Everything is different
since you’ve gone.

Everything is different
each time I consider it—

I have a thousand and one narratives
of how I could have saved you.

Sometimes you are the villain.
Sometimes I am the monster.

Sometimes we just fumble
together hopelessly in love.

I should dig up the hostas,
or the deer will come each year,

taking more and more each season.
I could leave them as a dream.

Someday the late bright white
perfection will return.

*

Laurel Brett, essayist, novelist, and poet feels the responsibility to do her tiny part to heal the world. She is inspired by awareness and love, and their expressions, and nature. Her novel, The Schrödinger Girl (Akashic Books, 2020) was called a page turner by the New York Times. Her work has appeared before in ONE ART, and in Second Coming, The Ekphrastic Review, Lilith, The Nassau Review among other outlets.

SPECIAL MISSION 16, SECONDARY TARGET NAGASAKI, AUGUST 9, 1945 by Laurel Brett

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SPECIAL MISSION 16, SECONDARY TARGET NAGASAKI, AUGUST 9, 1945

Imagine men in suits and uniforms inspecting planes.
No visit to the city bombed—

too much devastation. They hear reports.
The next bomb supposed to be the 11th but weathermen predict rain.

They plan the site of Kokura but waste time waiting to rendezvous
with the plane Big Stink set to photograph the operation & clouds

roll in. Bockscar will make the drop. Early reports are wrong
and say The Great Artiste carries the plutonium almost absent

in nature. The Bockscar auxiliary fuel tank pump on inspection
fails, but no one wants to waste the payload in the ocean

close to Okinawa. The brass who knows of buildings
marked by a soot silhouette, the entire residue

of one of us, aim now for Nagasaki,
the city we don’t speak of the way we do

Hiroshima. Hannah Arendt calls decision makers
banal. They don’t look like lizards,

but disassociation blinds, deafens
& insulates from atoms of love—

undercover agents sitting next to us,
watching the latest Mission Impossible.

*

Laurel Brett, essayist, novelist, and poet feels the responsibility to do her tiny part to heal the world. She is inspired by awareness and love, and their expressions, and nature. Her novel, The Schrödinger Girl (Akashic Books, 2020) was called a page turner by the New York Times. Her work has appeared before in ONE ART, and in Second Coming, The Ekphrastic Review, Lilith, The Nassau Review among other outlets.

Rituals of Blood by Laurel Brett

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Rituals of Blood

Blood prodded me to resign as a Jew.
Our Hebrew School teacher told
17 boys and 3 girls that God forbids us
to make love when our blood flows.

The 17 boys tittered
and 3 girls blushed, but I knew
I would always want to make love,
even if it was my time of blood.

I don’t know how I knew it,
but it proved true and 3 months later,
my first period began. The ache never
dampened desire. Ten year later

policemen bloodied us, shoving
supporters for Roe v Wade and the ERA
down stairs, We broke bones.
One of us had a heart attack.

In red states, women are bleeding
and dying again. Always rituals of blood,
like old rituals of water against women
who drowned innocent, weighed down by rocks.

*

Laurel Brett began writing poetry at fifteen because she loved writing with her purple flair pen. Since that time, she has become a college teacher, mother, political activist, literary critic, essayist and novelist. Her novel, THE SCHRÖDINGER GIRL, was published by Akashic Books (2020). Her essays and poems have appeared in The New York Times, Lilith, The Nassau Review, the anthology SONGS FOR SEASONED WOMEN, edited by Patti Tana, and the writing text, COMPLEMENTS, among other places. Two of her poems will appear in subsequent issues of SECOND COMING in March and April. She considers herself a refugee from the sixties. Her love of poetry began in seventh grade on a rainy day when she read a poetry anthology found on her parents’ book shelf cover to cover.