This selection, chosen by guest editor Layla Lenhardt, is from Talk Smack to a Hurricane by Lynne Jensen Lampe (IceFloe Press 2022).
Delivered
You wrote a letter after my birth.
I read the letter after your death.
Eight pages of onionskin,
every sentence fat with hope
smelling of joy & cedar.
Not that you wrote it to me.
Not that you lived its promise.
By the time your parents
slit the blue envelope
& unfolded its contents,
birthing had altered your mind.
Schizophrenia, manic-depression—
words doctors skimmed
from the DSM-I that led to meds,
hospitalizations, electroshock.
Nothing but the best
guesses of 1960s psychiatry.
Decades later, words bead like
water on wax & their strands
helix mother & daughter,
honor our bond. Your letter
cradles our truths.
Lynne Jensen Lampe’s debut collection, Talk Smack to a Hurricane (Ice Floe Press, 2022), a 2023 Eric Hoffer Book Award winner and finalist for the 8th Annual McMath Book Award, concerns motherhood, mental illness, and antisemitism. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Lips Poetry Journal, Stone Circle Review, Rise Up Review, THRUSH, Yemassee, and elsewhere. She edits academic writing, reads for Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and lives with her husband and two dogs in Columbia, MO, where she’s a core member of Dame Good Writers.
Layla Lenhardt (she/they) is an American poet. She is founder and Editor-in-Chief of the (currently on hiatus) national literary journal 1932 Quarterly. Her essays, poems, short prose, and interviews have been published across various types of media, including a pickle jar, a post card, and a bathroom stall in Dublin. She is a 2021 Best of the Net Nominee and was a judge for Poetry Super Highway’s Annual Contest in 2022. Her first full-length poetry collection, Mother Tongue, was published by Main Street Rag Publications (2023). She is a 2022 alumna of the SAFTA residency.
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