Oh, forgotten green milk glass,
shards on hard floor,
oh, wooden spoon, longing for kitchen work,
oh, yard stick, longer than wooden spoon.
Spiders in wooded forts, wooden blocks
dented wooden doors, rattle snake path.
These are the things you’ve saved.
You want instead:
brown and copper barometer,
a needle to warn of storms.
You want petri dish, a test tube,
conclusion on a black lab table.
You want compost, fertile soil, bones
and spine-rooted symmetry.
The smudged truth: clearing the throat like a meadow
from a forest, timber slabs to pulp of pages.
Tiny brass and steel tools in a green toolbox,
adjust the monocular of yore:
prisms and lenses click, magnifying
a transparent truth: you are not your past.
But your past is yours.
Author Bio:
Lindsey Wayland wrote her first poem when she was six. That first volume of poetry covered the pages inside a locked diary, whose key was the size of her six-year-old pinky knuckle. Poetry has always been about process for Lindsey--a way to access her inner council with a vernacular of whichever stage of life she is experiencing. Her love language is poetry, her wisdom exhales in poetry, her mind thinks in oft-fragmented enjambment, and the final pivotal gasping couplet is what she lives for. Lindsey's poetry has been published in Red River Review, Cordella Magazine, and Porter Gulch Literary Review. She lives in a cedar shake house in a meadow in the forest by the Salish Sea in Port Townsend with her husband and their three young children.
shards on hard floor,
oh, wooden spoon, longing for kitchen work,
oh, yard stick, longer than wooden spoon.
Spiders in wooded forts, wooden blocks
dented wooden doors, rattle snake path.
These are the things you’ve saved.
You want instead:
brown and copper barometer,
a needle to warn of storms.
You want petri dish, a test tube,
conclusion on a black lab table.
You want compost, fertile soil, bones
and spine-rooted symmetry.
The smudged truth: clearing the throat like a meadow
from a forest, timber slabs to pulp of pages.
Tiny brass and steel tools in a green toolbox,
adjust the monocular of yore:
prisms and lenses click, magnifying
a transparent truth: you are not your past.
But your past is yours.
Author Bio:
Lindsey Wayland wrote her first poem when she was six. That first volume of poetry covered the pages inside a locked diary, whose key was the size of her six-year-old pinky knuckle. Poetry has always been about process for Lindsey--a way to access her inner council with a vernacular of whichever stage of life she is experiencing. Her love language is poetry, her wisdom exhales in poetry, her mind thinks in oft-fragmented enjambment, and the final pivotal gasping couplet is what she lives for. Lindsey's poetry has been published in Red River Review, Cordella Magazine, and Porter Gulch Literary Review. She lives in a cedar shake house in a meadow in the forest by the Salish Sea in Port Townsend with her husband and their three young children.
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