Laura Minor
Pandemic Romance Dream During a Sunrise Hurricane
The neighbor’s employee is in the grass—
grieving his own mother, distilling in the storm.
The ocean elopes from my arms,
its pearls grabbing him, me,
my cigarette out
on his expensive all-weather jacket—
my old Buick Regal and the sky’s graying contract,
the morning silence blanched from within—
always steamed by brightness,
always cooled by water.
For all of our barnacles
fraught in their bohemian ensemble—
I waste myself
by waking:
hustling the dogs, grinding
the beans, clicking mute
on our crushed Victorian lighthouse
now saturated with daybreak—
two people who met
and hushed it like a plague.
Laura Minor reads “Pandemic Romance Dream During a Sunrise Hurricane”
Laura Minor won the 2020 John Ciardi Poetry Prize. Her debut book of poems, Flowers As Mind Control, is on BkMk Press/University of Arkansas Press, December 2021. She was also a finalist for the 2019 National Poetry Series and the winner of the 2019 ILA’s Rita Dove Poetry Award.