Dictionary

Revisiting the dictionary I grew up with, I inventory the artifacts between its pages. It’s a child’s book, illustrated with whimsy and deliberation. A little forest of coral hangs out in the Cs: a tiny inky heart of stalky reaching. Even then I collected paper. Tags. Inhabitants of a house of words: a bookmark I made in the fifth grade for a boy I had a crush on. A progress report from that same year. A birthday note in spidery script from an elderly maiden aunt. (I’d liked the way she made her capital L’s, how they swung out so much wider than every other letter.) A blue ribbon for a picture I took of my old gray cat, reclining on flagstones next to boxed petunias. A nine-year-old’s Christmas wish list (a telescope, some Smarties in my stocking, a set of watercolors, a blank book I’d seen with an owl on the front). An incoherent note from a girl I barely knew. A thimbleful of purple confetti stuck with glitter and glue to the definition of “trellis.” Someone’s name, in orange crayon on black construction paper, smudged.

Laura Sorrells
© 2007 all rights reserved

almost

steaming water engulfs
dry linden buds--
almost silent

©laura sorrells 2010
all rights reserved

Fade

An austere resilience
anchors this patchwork
of ark and territory,
cajoles a leaking eddy
of vertigo away from
the directives of dreamtime.
Landmarks mimic palaces,
then unmark themselves
completely. Some blank
untelling vanishes the birthrights
of air and forest.
When does the pirate
become the melancholy saint,
tethered by the silent slide
of an inexorable forgetting?

--Laura Sorrells
© 2010 All rights reserved.