A woman has taken a man into the kitchen, shows him the pan
stripped of its black coat—Taken years to form, she says,
and grabs the unscented orange cleanser, like picking
the tree, a globe ready to burst. She dreams the past,
gurney ride down a hallway, and under the gas she’s breast-
stroking in the pool with her mother who wears an old style
cap, white with thick flower petals, and at the same time
she’s standing above herself in the operating room monitoring
the anesthesia, yet she’s also in a small boat crossing
a foggy river where an oarsman spoons into her mouth
the jelly she ate before a different surgery where Dr. Yang slit
her belly button, red liquid from a baby’s crown except
she never got that far. Later in recovery, she thinks I was right
though all she can hear is her mother’s opera, the tenor’s Italian
garbled with scratchy old-record sounds, uttering Stripped
of your motherhood bouncing off the metal stand with tissue box
and lip balm, her glasses case, and the curtains are pale
peach like childhood room and the air freshener
in that galley kitchen, Citrus Breeze, and she remembers
the vacation, the motel in Winemucca en route to Yellowstone
where they paid more than $6 but less than $12 and the family
style restaurant with huge plates of stew, and how he rode
the fast highway like an ambulance driver yet reverent
of the speed limit, the long freight train dragging
cows to their death, and the boxcar they waited for
as she used her fingernails to peel a long singular piece
into her lap, then segmented and inserted each piece
into her mouth, the juice smarting a sore, but the train
never ended and the salt flats, they were blinding white.
Laurel Benjamin is a San Francisco Bay Area poet, active with the Women’s Poetry Salon. She curates Ekphrastic Writers and is a reader for Common Ground Review. Publications: Pirene’s Fountain, Lily Poetry Review, Cider Press Review, Taos Journal of Poetry, Mom Egg Review, Gone Lawn, Nixes Mate. She received an Honorable Mention for the Ruben Rose Memorial Poetry Competition. Her work has also been anthologized in Gunpowder Press’ Women in a Golden State (2025), among others. Her new collection, Flowers on a Train, is forthcoming from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. Find her at: laurelbenjamin.com.
Image: firstforwomen.com
Check out HFR’s book catalog, publicity list, submission manager, and buy merch from our Spring store. Follow us on Instagram and YouTube. Disclosure: HFR is an affiliate of Bookshop.org and we will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Sales from Bookshop.org help support independent bookstores and small presses.
Heavy Feather Review 