Laurie Kolp

The 12-Step Meeting

All night long, we spoke of loneliness,
the impossibility of being human
a song with a lost room inside.
We scraped syllables off the same records,
threaded needles rising through the smoky air
as if, one by one, the memories
gathered like a dream drenched in frost.
​

Sources: : L1- John Unterecker, Midwinter L2- Charles Bukowski, Beasts Bounding Through Time L3- Nick Flynn, Father Outside L4- Cedar Sigo, On Strings of Blue L5- Wendy DeGroat, On the Addition of a Black Candle to the Center of Our Advent Wreath L6- Billy Collins, Forgetfulness L7- John Unterecker, Midwinter

Letting Go of Resentment


Poised on the tip of your tongue,
it comes unasked out of your heart and your mind and your
mouth— green rot touching metal slurry of the ocean.
Swept clean, bloodstained, its sea-washed crater
a speck of grit shuffing oyster-tongue
fingers, words against skin
swollen with strange selves, distended
toward the rising quarter moon.
​

Sources: L1- Billy Collins, Forgetfulness L2- Charles Bukowski, So You Want to Be a Writer L3- Joe Hall, Utopia: Love as Last Day L4- Pablo Neruda, The Night in Isla Negro L5- Malka Older, Muse L6- Bob Hicok, My Most Recent Position Paper L7- John Unterecker, ...Within, Into, Inside, Under, Within... L8- Elizabeth Hitchcock, Five Sequential Stress Dreams

The Witness


Morning finds clothes on Mother’s front porch, shed like week-old lilies.
Nothing is so scarred as this place, shards of parched cloth trampled by footprints.
 
I pull myself back again to a place where I
watched him eat his knuckles, punch a hole into his stomach--
 
the gun he held had just killed someone
on whose small bones a dress hung for a while.
​

Sources: L1- Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous L2- John Unterecker, The Hero L3- Nick Flynn, The Incomprehensibility L4- Geula Geurts- Tales I Tell Myself (II) L5- Eavan Boland, Heroic L6- Gerald Stern, My Sister’s Funeral




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Laurie Kolp is the author of Upon the Blue Couch (Winter Goose Publishing) and Hello, It’s Your Mother (Finishing Line Press). Her recent publications include Stirring, Rust + Moth, Whale Road Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Front Porch Journal, and more. Laurie lives in Southeast Texas with her husband, three children and two dogs.