Two by Lara Payne

Breath and Remedy

Well-wishes at the opening of the day. Good, have a good.. .have you any sugar, please. Pleas to the sky, the

god. Wishes on an eyelash, the train-track, the clover, the clock saying 11:11. I am plural, I am they,

since 2009, no singular, here. Someday we women may stop apologizing. Such a comfortable land: the

geography of an apology. That dip, there, topographic lines of green and blue. The realization that you

may have taken someone’s time or comfort, or perhaps misunderstood them. The rush to fill, words

tumble like the songs we sang on the bus, all of us a chorus, singing Take on Me, falsetto so high we

broke into giggles on I’ll be gone. More and more, I turn music off, so I might hear the frogs and a bird

whose name I do not yet know. Books appear alchemically. Tarot, and artists fleeing a war. Today a

poem I search for, about the artist whose hair flames up up up, only arrives after I abandon the quest.

Remedios Varo, her art is the remedy, a gate into dream.

Bramble

Bramble-caught, thorn stung.

There is not one tree here whose leaves are green. Winter dead thorns line the edge of the

field. They grab me and somehow encircle my ankle. They are frost darkened, sharp, biting.

“This is not what I meant, when I said I wanted to be in a fairytale.” I say to the empty field,

to the not here hero.

Am I talking to my lonely, strong, striving self?

Birds are calling: when, and who, and here-here-here. Turtles tumble into the vernal pool.

Wasn’t it always magic that I wanted? As if one could choose only happiness. No witch to

curse or eat you, no lonely tower, no wolf’s sharp jaw. Before I knew that everyone will have a dark

path, that moment of grief. A lonely and sad childhood. The beloved one dead.

When I was in books, in stories I was and was not myself. I was the story, the hero, the

dragon, the lost girl who must be found, the hero given an impossible task. Even now I start to

change the point of view, I think “when she was in the story.” Who is this she? Is it the me that I

want to disassociate from? Perhaps I will have empathy, if I say she. Will I give the child me

sympathy for all that I did not have? Abandoned. Unwanted. Survivor.

There was a story I loved. A lonely older woman who longs to be a mother. A tiny girl, lost.

This is not my story. This is not my mother who had me at 22: leaving, and leaving again. I shrink as

small as Thumbelina, press myself into the thin yellow book of fairytales, I will walk past the story

with the girl asleep for a hundred years in a field of brambles. I will sleep in a flower, be given a

thimble as a bed, find a bird to carry me away. Someday I will believe I am worthy/

Lara Payne lives in Maryland. Her poems, many of which explore the Chesapeake environment and people, have appeared in a museum, on buses, and in print and online journals. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Gargoyle and SWWIM Daily. --