dark liquid where the butter separates
& I’ve devoured a quarter of the globe,
bags of Indian snack mix, torn
edge of a mushroom pizza, where burnt mecca
rips through the roof of the mouth.
With my hands I mix ground meat with zucchini
& add green onion, sumac, and mint.
I tatter the edge of sausage casings where stains
left behind in a pan signal
where I’ve found myself daily. I’ve sold
garlic fries at a street fair stand
where we started early and ended at sunset,
clairvoyants pushing trash to the curb.
I’ve sat in a patch near a stream in spring
with a man who stared
at my chest & all I could do was eat
the strawberries I’d brought,
red all the way through, seeds &
red jell juice sticking
at the corners.
Laurel Benjamin is a native of the San Francisco Bay Area, where she invited a secret language with her brother. She has writing forthcoming or published in Lily Poetry Review, Turning a Train of Thought Upside Down: An Anthology of Women’s Poetry, South Florida Poetry Journal, Trouvaille Review, The Ekphrastic Review, among others. Affiliated with the SF Bay Area Women’s Poetry Salon and the Port Townsend Writers, she holds an MFA from Mills College and is a reader for Common Ground Review.
Eunoia Review 