Laurel Benjamin
Laurel Benjamin is a San Francisco Bay Area native, where she invented a secret language with her brother. She has work forthcoming or published in Lily Poetry Review, Pirene’s Fountain, The Shore, Mom Egg Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, Nixes Mate, among others. Affiliated with the Bay Area Women’s Poetry Salon and Ekphrastic Writers, she holds an MFA from Mills College. She is a reader for Common Ground Review and has featured in the Lily Poetry Review Salon. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize.
At the market after reading about the alien meteorite,
I worry how much longer they’ll stock peaches, almost out of season
with their shimmer hairs or strawberries
congealed. The produce manager arranges varieties
of apples and pears, when a woman gasps, her finger
on the price tag for nectarines from a local farm. What choice
but to buy fruit while a fragment fireball threatens to crumb,
morsel, shiver us into dust? Called alien
from a magma ocean, special equipment required to see the blue
glow. As I head to the meat counter, I think about my mother
at the Woolworths counter ordering liver and onions for us,
something my father and brother would never stand for,
and she’d say Can you feel the boost? As if iron
swam through our blood, sweetness cutting the metallic taste
as soon as ingested, and I think of the meteorite, who they say
comes from an iron-rich ocean. I consider how much chicken
I need for the tacos, when really I’m also weighing how happy
I should be when scientists talk about something
they call true promise, where we can learn the history of the galaxy,
because won’t uncovering the truth reveal the underside
of fruit peel, tender strife of yellow, and explain
why my mother needed to fortify us with liver? But I’d rather stare
out windows bank to the street where cars rev at the light,
then speed away. On one shelf they’ve stocked
handmade crocheted hats and gloves. Maybe they’ve always
been there, not just for the holidays. And despite the comet
at any moment closing in, crashing, I live for the Shangri-la
choosing of foods, planning to make four kinds of salsas,
and on another day, Malabar curry, potatoes and cauliflower
with black mustard seed, and to accompany a salad, a honeyed
chevre to spread on walnut levain—bodies without
a trajectory, no interstellar activity. I overhear a customer
asking for help—can’t find the fresh mozzarella, then mumbling,
no caprese tonight. I reach into the refrigerator case
for the sheep’s milk yogurt from Sonoma.
Almost everything checked off the list.
