Laura Lee Beasley
What to Say for Grief
Say first, the constellations are changing.
Fifty thousand years from now,
Orion will lower his shield.
Ursa Minor's paw will open,
the fading stars of his shape
dissolving into the night sky.
Place a green grape on your tongue.
Feel it, sun-lit and round.
You’ll want to keep it there.
Let your mouth break it open.
Laura Lee Beasley has a PhD in Creative Writing, Poetry from Georgia State University where she worked as an assistant editor at Five Points-A Journal of Art & Literature and was the poetry editor for New South. She teaches English and creative writing at the University of West Georgia and has worked as a copyeditor for St. Martin’s Press. Among other publications, her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The Split Rock Review, Silk Road Review, Apple Valley Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Stone, River, Sky: An Anthology of Georgia Poems, and in Time You Let Me In, an anthology published by HarperCollins and edited by Naomi Shihab Nye. She was selected as a semi-finalist for Nimrod's Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry and as a Special Merit winner in the Comstock Review's Muriel Craft Bailey Contest, judged by Marge Piercy.
Return to September 2019 Edition
Say first, the constellations are changing.
Fifty thousand years from now,
Orion will lower his shield.
Ursa Minor's paw will open,
the fading stars of his shape
dissolving into the night sky.
Place a green grape on your tongue.
Feel it, sun-lit and round.
You’ll want to keep it there.
Let your mouth break it open.
Laura Lee Beasley has a PhD in Creative Writing, Poetry from Georgia State University where she worked as an assistant editor at Five Points-A Journal of Art & Literature and was the poetry editor for New South. She teaches English and creative writing at the University of West Georgia and has worked as a copyeditor for St. Martin’s Press. Among other publications, her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The Split Rock Review, Silk Road Review, Apple Valley Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Stone, River, Sky: An Anthology of Georgia Poems, and in Time You Let Me In, an anthology published by HarperCollins and edited by Naomi Shihab Nye. She was selected as a semi-finalist for Nimrod's Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry and as a Special Merit winner in the Comstock Review's Muriel Craft Bailey Contest, judged by Marge Piercy.
Return to September 2019 Edition