In the pub, thick with smoke
and various fake penguins,
we three friends tip out
the golden coattails of last call,
scurry a bottle to a nearby field
to lean between the thighs of two small hills,
and drink to our newness in want with words—
this is the moment we choose
wilderness instead of rooms.
We sit and talk away the coolness of soil
until no one mistakes this for anything else,
and we are just a tangle of luxury in the grass,
a triangle of bodies holding up the sky—
three newly introduced poetry students
and a bottle of good whiskey.
Chaos cannot shoulder us in this field.
And what you think of your friends
on the first night you really talk with them,
the first fun, will soon turn astringent
in the inclement weather of everyday
betrayals and secrets revealed, changing
into different people, flowers more horrid
than when in bloom, now disguised as topsoil.
But this grass doesn't know the future.
In this moment, one friend needs his wife,
and the other, his duende is buried
in some cavity where there lives
a fountain of youth that can never be young.
Tomorrow, someone is still going to need
the brightest green shirt of a year, a job,
someone who’ll forgive our August
seaside whimper; soon, my friends,
we are going to destroy each other.
Someone will be rejected, left leaning
into the shell of their hands, someone
will break a window to get a little air—
I want to remember us as bodies
exhaling the odes of somewhere else,
fumbling for riotous liberty as unnamed slayers,
grass angels exercising their pastoral stupidity,
rising with empty cups to abandon the hour,
fall off the page. No matter what we do,
this revolving ball of dirt will turn
like a tea bag around a spoon.
And no worry; friends will always stay
with each other for the want of what is greater—
to that simplicity, I say yes,
if this can just be three friends in the grass
instead of what we’ve known,
ripped and piled high, pea tendrils
thrown in a bowl—
give me the terrestrial against the old,
the ancient text of air and other for another go.
Laura Minor won the 2020 John Ciardi Prize for her debut collection, Flowers As Mind Control, forthcoming from BkMk Press in spring/summer 2021. She was a finalist for the 2019 National Poetry Series and nominated for both a 2018 Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets 2018. She won the 2019 International Literary Awards, Rita Dove Poetry Award, chosen by Marilyn Nelson, the 2019 Sassaman Graduate Creative Writing Award, and the 2016 Emerging Writers Spotlight Award, chosen by poet D.A. Powell. She was named in the 2018 article, "10 Acclaimed FSU English Professors That Will Inspire You" by collegemagazine.com. Her poetry is forthcoming or has most recently appeared in the North American Review, The Missouri Review, South Carolina Review, Quiddity International Literary Journal, Arc Poetry Magazine, The American Poetry Journal, Berfrois, and the 2020 New River's Press Anthology, "Wild Gods: The Ecstatic In Contemporary Poetry and Prose." She was a Teacher’s College Fellow at Columbia University and the recipient of a Sarah Lawrence Poetry Award, chosen by Denise Duhamel, where she also received her M.F.A. She holds a Ph.D. from Florida State University where she recently resided as Visiting Assistant Professor. She currently lives off the Appalachian Trail.
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