This selection, chosen by guest editor Valyntina Grenier, is from I Was One of My Memories by Laurie Blauner (Pank Books 2021).
It’s likely that something is happening
Today I’m an animal waiting for moonlight to move me, muffling my words,
carving my sentences like initials in a tree. I’m bereft of children. I merge my
exhalations with my husband’s breath in a city that traps shadows behind emerging
buildings. I perplex my mother and use the monotonous language of cicadas with
my sister. I’m in a boat, refusing to float on a startled sea with my dead father. I
water withered plants. I can lure water into the shape of a glass. I feel misplaced
by rain, which already knows too much about me, which might think it is me.
Laurie Blauner is the author of eight books of poetry, five novels, and a hybrid non-fiction book called I Was One of My Memories that won PANK’s CNF Book Award. Her work has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Georgia Review, Superstition Review, The Nation, The New Republic, Poetry, and many other magazines.
Valyntina Grenier is a multi-genre eco artist living with her wife in Tucson, AZ. She works with paint, ink, Neon, encaustic medium, recycled or repurposed materials and words. She is the author of Honeymoon Shoes and the chapbooks, Fever Dream/ Take Heart and In Our Now. You’ll find her work in, Beyond Queer Words, Genre: Urban Arts, Impermanent Earth, Lana Turner, The Journal, Querencia, and The Wardrobe. Find her at valyntinagrenier.com or Insta @valyntinagrenier.
