Thrush Poetry Journal
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Laren McClung

Sleeptalk
 
This woman was the ghost. The ghost 
said there was no such thing 
 
as love. The soldier said love, 
but the word was already disappearing 
 
as it left his mouth. All things 
are disappearing. He said 
 
I have something for you 

& the room inside her caught fire. 
 
The soldier gave a whole village gone up, 
the apartment, the wife, the woman 
 
at night. In his sleep he saw their daughter. 
It doesn’t matter, just sleeptalk. 
 
In the kitchen he wore the mask 
of a jackal to hide himself as he swept 
 
the broken glass into a mason jar 
left by the window, he said to trap the ghost. 




Hotel Reverie
 

On a Bowery corner where Haring 
once tagged a mural long gone now, 
heavy leather conjures a night 
locked in the graveyard of lovers. 
I’m not sure which man awakens 
the deep animal in the amygdala, 
but I move toward the gothic 
jacket led by an old calling. Honey, 
he’s not you, but I remember 
how you loved first with your nose 
brushing at the vulva’s ingress 
where crossing waters you’d rock 
until we became ancestral, mammal. 
Here on the corner the hive of memory 
leans into a man I do not know 
who looks back almost as if he stood 
that night on the French Quarter 
blue-hour balcony, our two figures 
swaying on the ledge of morning.




Laren McClung is the author of Between Here and Monkey Mountain (Sheep Meadow Press 2012). She received her MFA from the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University in 2009. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in reviews including The Massachusetts Review; Cerise Press; The American Reader; Harvard Review, PN Review; War, Literature and the Arts and elsewhere. She has been granted fellowships from Teachers and Writers Collaborative, New York University, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She is co-editor of an anthology-in-progress, Inheriting the War: Poetry and Prose by Descendants of Vietnam Veterans and Refugees and teaches Expository Writing at New York University.




Return to November 2014 Edition