Laurel Benjamin

She springs from fissures,

ohi'a flower native to the volcano,
landscape of ash, the daughter I never had.
The trail to reach the site a tunnel
of ferns, then
out into the open. But I'm curious
how underground, tucked safely away until it's time,
a mother gives birth to a long stem.
Muscle, pulse.

I've heard babies can erase the woman 
like garden cuttings of new shoots
pushing their authority. Heard of an upside-down
ankle grabbed by a twin in utero
in that un-dry space, seen sketches of an outside arm
pulling a puppet string.

I have no vision of what's unseeable
under the hard crusted lava, have no career of how tectonics
operate purely by touch. Never wanted
something so pure.

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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.