Laurel Peterson Verse-Virtual 2016 July

July 2016

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

Tug

You
are a silken thread
knotted and sewn into my heart.
Every turn
   to look at a soaring eagle
   to smell the floating breeze
   to taste the first flake of snow
tugs the thread,
sends a tiny shiver of shock
to remind me
you’re not here
and won’t be ever.

Sewn into your heart
is the other end,
knotted just under the fragile
epicardium.
We both must move
so very gently.

The cord itself remains unfailing:
even if it is dirtied or worn by ice or heat,
ridden by sparrows and picked apart by crows,
its fibers never lose their integrity:
never fray or shred
or lessen in tension or
their ability to signal across
the great distance
of our unremitting singularity
to say
I’m here.
I’m waiting.