Having spent the night
with the random 2x4 propped
at the ready against the chipped, red door—
and with her fears as they change and ripple
through the small, domestic bedlam of their planets—
she wants to transform and plunge down from herself.
She thinks of the rosy-cheeked teen eagle hunter
high on a mountain who she once saw on the internet,
and that bird of prey
springing from the embroidered perch of her own arm
down into a rodent-littered ravine where peonies grow.
The winter coat on the chair has pockets full of loose pills:
one for youth, one for disease, and one for recreation.
All the rooms!
The dulcimer, restrung on its stand to the far wall,
its curvature bronzed by the sunlight,
where the marble bust of a woman turns away
from the breath tipping out of the delphiniums,
and her favorite books leaning into each other
are not enough to stop the nights when gravitational waves
swallow even the idea of light.
Or how loud the refrigerator is?
Or Sylvia Plath, dead 55 years,
she read earlier in the day.
And coins that end up buried in the earth,
having once meant something to a kid,
now lie flatly in the bottom of a heavy purse.
Laura Minor won both FSU's nominations for AWP's Intro Journals Project 2018 and Best New Poets 2018. She is the recipient of the 2016 Emerging Writers Spotlight Award at FSU, chosen by poet, D.A. Powell. Her poetry has most recently appeared in Arc Poetry Magazine, The American Poetry Journal, O: JA&L, Berfrois, and Queen Mob's Tea House. She was named in "10 Acclaimed FSU English Professors that Will Inspire You" by collegemagazine.com, was a Teacher’s College Fellow at Columbia University, and the recipient of a Sarah Lawrence Poetry Award where she received her M.F.A. Also a singer-songwriter, she is also currently working on a third record while she finishes her debut book of poems as a doctoral candidate in poetry at Florida State University.