Laurel Benjamin

Panel me

I take it back, re-sew stiches on the boat-neck shirt,
light yellow almost ivory
belonging to my mother. I retract the seams & bring them
into focus. I'm not a doctor,
no tools sterilized. I take it back, comments about Charles Simic--
he read like a dove whose back feathers
crossed neatly. Like him
I never cried when the wine ran out, never danced late, never
wrangled into a community hall
on New Year's. I collected
needles from junkies at Civic Center,
would hand out vouchers
like my father except I'm not wearing his grey plaid jacket
with stiff sleeves. I take it back,
never wanted to work sealed off in a little room, craved
to serve customers in the bookstore
who stared at my chest & bought
technical books or
the ones who tried to convince me to have children. Never craved
a slice
of pizza from next door, smell of cornmeal & lime.

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Laurel Benjamin is a San Francisco Bay Area native, where she invented a secret language with her brother. She has work in Lily Poetry Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, Sky Island Journal, South Florida Poetry Journal, Turning a Train of Thought Upside Down: An Anthology of Women's Poetry, 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. She was nominated for Best of the Net by Flapper Press in fall 2022.