Laura Bieber
The Dreaming
Last night I felt the beginning of things.
A lumbered weight, eyes blur the page,
a hum that burrows to another place.
Until that Technicolor world hauls me from
this captive state.
I caught this morning the unraveling of things.
Legs twined, arms in a taut embrace,
cheek mashed against the pillow, caught in a
firehouse of dreams, burned into each crease of my face.
I dawdle: run, leap, fly, hide in open space.
The light falls on a familiar hallway.
It's always like this:
the beat, beat, beat of a larger heart.
And I am carried to forgotten places.
Rain glances off my window,
and the smell of coffee from the kitchen.
The house is still except for the refrigerator's murmur.
Voices carry in the silence below the ordinary drone.
I caught this morning a little of that time.
Down the receding street, into the house,
I reach into the blackened hearth:
a dusty heart. That's mine.
River
While they sang together,
wife and husband,
their vows wrapped around them
like a wool blanket, that lamp lit night,
she could forget her lover.
her life was flowing past theirs
in a current of deception:
wrong numbers, camping trips
with girlfriends, nightly jogs.
But that night,
in the bright house they had built,
old brass shining
with hours of patient polish,
dark heads bent together,
sitting cross-legged on the floor,
she held fast to the light willow
of his low voice; their harmonious voices
and the steady plunk of their guitars
fell into the room
like pebbles into still water.
Even while she hammered
the For Sale sign into dry ground,
she heard the careful murmur
of their brushes,
the ripple of smooth paint.
Tinsel
Shadow of my beloved
falls like light
to the brown fields,
falls across the tented
landscape before the soft
light, the greenest
green of the bent
trees leaning in to earth.
Beloved beyond all reason,
thin shadow of a line of your cheek,
imagined space long held.
I give you my heart's string
strung like tinsel across the low pines.
Take a stalk of meadow grass,
brittle brown of the hurt
trunks of the pine trees.
I am originally from California, where I graduated from UCLA with an English degree, and later participated in a M.A. program in creative writing at Cal State Northridge.
While there, I published poems in several small journals, including Saturday Afternoon, Poets Coffeehouse Quarterly, Caffeine, and Verve. I'm still writing poems, but I hadn't submitted anything for a good while, and lately some of my poems have been feeling neglected. So I am beginning to submit poetry for publication again, and I have a poem in the current issue of Gumball Poetry.
I live in Portland, Oregon, with my fiance Jeff, three cats, and two roommates, and since 1998 I've been an ebay seller, selling resale designer and vintage clothing, code name magicpumpkin.
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