Honey, and Other Poems
by Lori Lamothe
Honey
Even a spoonful holds enough warmth
to keep you alive through another winter.
Outside, light bleaches landscape
and every living thing goes on sleeping
under snow’s newly washed blanket.
Since leaves fell red across fields,
your life has been hibernating, a bear
dark in its cave, dreaming of water
roaring down mountains, of summers
spent roaming Alaskas of imagination.
What kind of world you’ll actually
stumble into when you wake is unclear.
In the meantime, your mind pours amber
into the hollow that hunger carved
in solitude, fills January’s cup to the brim.
Shack
The stories it held
never amounted to anything—
the bright paint
bleached by wind and too strong a light,
the voices that rose and fell with its tides
on the other side of happening.
We pass it going and then coming back,
half expecting it to have already
stepped out of existence—
proving what we don’t want to believe,
its solidity a piece of driftwood
blown out to sea.
Even the doors of its silence are boarded up.
Surrounded by the future’s endless
plate-glass windows, it folds in upon itself
like an origami replica of failure
or the woman at the reunion
nobody claims to remember—
not no longer beautiful but never
beautiful and yet, somehow, gorgeous
in aloneness, in form stripped
of everything, even memory,
skyclad
as the calm at the eye of a storm.
Bliss
