JAMIE O'HARA LAURENS

YOU ARE SOMETIMES A FIELD

the child is the knot-‐grass
cross-‐stitched
it dries and splits
and the earth of you cracks
.
the child is insects
stitching holes
.
the child is a thorn bush
no, the child is a child, but he is
at the same time your sapling
your thorn-‐bush
.
watch from this distance,
your field-‐flat distance
you would gather your skirt of mulch
to face him but cannot
lift yourself to stand
.
because you are not there—no
you are there,
you are just the soil that permits the view
you are the space for growing, for leaving
.
you hold to the ground
while at the end of the field
he looks out unawares,
and you cannot reach him
no, you cannot reach him
.

PREDATOR

Call me Rapacious.
Call me Plunderer.

The days go by with nothing but a palette of hunger:
berries, bark and waiting—
waiting for the lunge of sinew.
We lilt and huddle.

I see the men have built a tower around them of hollow wood.
I’ll not set foot inside it:

When my spirit goes hungry, it roams.

I pause beneath a window where firelight
flickers worried at a woman’s head.

I see her not comprehend how she and I are one.
As a child she saw a face like mine loom in her window at night.

Call me Plunderer.

We scrape the casing they make for themselves
           with accidental wounds, till they hear us and concede.
           One day she will walk out that tall, narrow door
                 in our teeth.

Jamie O'Hara Laurens is absolutely beautiful. And brilliant. There isn't anything you can throw at her that she can't lasso, tame and ride off into soft-hued pastures on, with a piano concerto she learned to play by ear as her soundtrack. Jamie holds an MFA in Poetry and Translation and teaches, writes and translates in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has appeared in The Refined Savage Review and the Ping Pong Journal of the Henry Miller Library.