Lara Klein
Breakfast Poem And now it is cloudy in my mind. This morningYou stirred your cup and sighed. “This is the silverSound that broke into my dream last night. HardTo tell what is part of my sleep and what isn’t.Hard to think it wasn’t accidental.” In a flurry my mind sketched a charcoalImage of our daughter standing at the topOf a snowy street alone. Black smudges of hair,Black blurred her eyes, brought tears to mine. AtThe end the vision opened her mouth. IWaited there but of course she never spoke. Daffodils Your brow was black like the fence where we metTo discuss nothing. You began to sayMany things but you always broke off. WhileYou were talking my heel tore the wet earthOpen. One yellow trumpet bent as ifTo console my nervous shoe. The rain hasSaid more to my shoes than you have to me.Why can’t I be someone who is allowed toLive after all? As we parted I thoughtit was our black umbrellas that kept usFrom touching but when I turned awayI found I had no world anymore. Rooftops I’ve been dreaming about falling, yetUnlike in O’Hara’s poem the leaves areYellowed and fiery. A rush of air willCue me, the wet leaves too will rush headlong,Branches will brush my face. I’ve tried to tellThem my dream, but nothing ever happens.It’s as if such talk were not permittedAt tea. It’s not, I want to add,That I want to leave the swaying birchesOr the deepening blue sky, but that theWorld seems adamant that I live alone. Lara Klein is a young writer originally from Regina, Saskatchewan. Educated at the University of Toronto, she has had work published in The Quill, Forage, and Synaeresis magazines.