December 23, 2010

Laurie Junkins

THE VIEW, THE WORLD, MY MOTHER

Driving up the New Jersey Turnpike, I glance
to the right, across the Hudson, at Manhattan
packed in smog as if cushioned for shipping, buildings
jutting from its milky haze in dark spikes,

and I wonder if this was how it looked after that fall day—
if for weeks a cloud of particles expanded along streets
like foam. I think of the smoke hanging at the ceiling
of my father’s house that night when, left alone,

age ten, I built a fire. I didn’t know about the damper,
ran across the street for help, coughing and crying
in blue-flowered pajamas, the smell like a campfire
but darker, this smoke reeking of houses burning down,

of fire eating not marshmallows but drapes
and beds and lives. Smoke like a monster’s fetid breath,
like the coal haze over China that burns eyes,
scrapes at the tissues of throats and lungs. Stacks exhaling

over gray cities, tailpipes coughing along ribbons of highways,
even the grease-coated belches of restaurant kitchens.
And my mother, too. Even her, pulling the smoke
of each Benson & Hedges into her body as if starving for it,

holding her cigarette in that yellowed valley
worn into her first and second fingers, the smoke
twining around her head in ethereal curls, clinging
to her hair, clothes, the rugs, the walls, the cat, clinging

to me, who grew cocooned within it, wrapped
always in a bunting of foul, whispering smoke.

from Rattle #33, Summer 2010

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January 31, 2010

Laurie Junkins

MIDWESTERN GOTHIC

That frigid Wichita month hangs
in my history like a smoke-darkened
painting—all tight-lipped Presbyterians
and dormant cornfields frozen beneath
the iron gray slab of January. I was trapped
in a rusty carbuncle of a travel-trailer
stuck like a pimple on someone’s winter
field, a landscape slapped flat by God’s hand.
Each night my father and his wife belted out
’70s pop standards billed as Foxfyre,
in a month-long gig at The Candle Club.
In my eight-by-four bunk, I stared
out a tiny porthole at the Kansas tundra
glittering in moonlight, a bedazzled spread,
and listened to the scritch and thump
of rabbits copulating in the glow
of the heat lamps that warmed
our trailer’s plumbing. Exiled from Denver
and my sixth-grade classroom, I read and re-read
Heidi, made a week-long project of peeling
the price sticker off her face
printed on the cover, scratching away
each gluey shred until my thumbnail
softened and bent inward. But she wasn’t
pretty after all, and then I lost her
somewhere in that 160 square feet
of Kansas winter, so I filled hours
with Xeroxed worksheets and textbook
math, peering at the road outside
for February, as if looking for thaw.

from Rattle #31, Summer 2009

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