Chapbook contest deadline extended one week!
The deadline for our 2020 Midwest Chapbook Contest has been extended!
The deadline for our 2020 Midwest Chapbook Contest has been extended!
A message from the editors about recent events in America.
Submit to The Laurel Review's annual chapbook contest!
Issue 52.2 has arrived back from the printer!
Contest Winner Decided
This week's feature is from issue 48.2 called "The Planet of Lost Things" by Becca Shaw Glaser.
1.
The part of me that isn’t sleeping gets up, goes outside, walks to the
neighbor’s trash pile, fishes out the white vinegar and the whole wheat
flour, walks back up the steps, puts everything
on the counter and slides back into bed with me. Heartbreak
is a multinational commodity. Maybe I’m unlucky
in love, or more likely, I’m a psycho-bitch with badass vocal chords and
excellent texting skills.
2.
We were married at sea. Underwater I licked his earlobes. He wiggled my
toes.
He couldn’t even bring himself to look at my
drawings. I kept dreaming
of someone who would fit me on some deeper spirit plane, someone with
the right acupuncture to get that precise spot—twenty years into it
he’d enter the room and I’d still
swoon. We ended up
washed-up anarchists chewing nasty microwave popcorn, scarfing water-
stained Lavyrle
Spencer novels on the beach, perpetually irritated
by the sounds of each other’s breath.
3.
So much in life is left
unfinished. The grown-ups
were heaving chairs, their legs stuck out at the top of the pile. The black sky
snapped
with ash and spark, stars beyond
the yellow smoke, the spired silhouettes of fir trees.
The biggest fire I’d ever seen. He must have been four, I would have been
six.
I don’t remember his face
but we must have danced around with all the other kids, our little bodies,
huckleberry stains around our lips, excited to be up
so late. You could spend
a century apologizing, crying blood, and still
not fix it.
4.
In the tent I was horny. The wasps began to buzz. I never respected his lack
of politics but
I loved him.
5. A novelist said Don't go into marriage thinking it's going to make you any
less lonely.
6.
A last glimpse of his ankle, pink and strong, rising out of the dark shoe
I’d given him.
He’d rushed up the stairs to find me. On the roof of his building I was
burning
with jealousy, having spied our old condom tin in a new spot. Maybe it’s
better
to be single. No one
to wrestle but myself, the responsibilities
of keeping this stick-poke-tattoo sell-out first world body alive.
I’ve had to do most of the healing on my own.
7.
Only in myth is there proper
redemption. I crawl back out of my sleeping self.
I go back to Baltimore and crawl into bed with him.
And on that last night, all night we hold each other, and when we shift, we
shift together.
Between us something like a baby had grown. Somewhere in the world
it’s still crawling.