December 2016
Laurel Peterson
laurelpeterson@att.net
laurelpeterson@att.net
I’ve been writing since I was eight, despite being told that I shouldn’t. Writing revealed too much. This is why I tell my students they should never be afraid to put the truth on the page. I’m a community college English professor, who alternately loves and despairs of her students. I’ve written lots of different things—newspaper columns, academic stuff, poems (including two chapbooks and a forthcoming full-length collection) and a couple of mystery novels, one of which will be published this spring by Barking Rain Press. I have the very great pleasure of serving the town of Norwalk, Connecticut, as its poet laureate. At this very moment, my dog is sniffing through my trash for a draft of something to chew on. My website: www.laurelpeterson.com
Things to Hoard for Nuclear Winter
the body doesn’t exist
in grief
or perhaps the body
is sole:
that pressure
under the ribs,
the sun, an entire universe of stars,
exploding
scattering itself
like shreds of washed tissue
grief needs no windows
or doors or fires
that extend acres
past their deprivation
to keep flesh bonded to bone
perhaps all one requires is a wall
dissolved but remaking itself,
ribbed vault,
arching stone branches
that frame
a howling,
hug the skeleton
in this dim
sarcophagus
breathing
breathless
still
Previously Published: Saranac Review, April 2012
©2016 Laurel Peterson
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