“We are not idealized wild things” — Joan Didion, Magical Thinking
–
The cat swipes her paw on the tv screen when mice appear,
pokes her head behind the monitor, growls as noses
dart and little bodies dig a dirt mound. She’s figured out
how to peel back a scent of dirt, runs on a fur-scattered
trail into darkness. After my mother died, I connected
stars with hand-drawn lines like fairy lights.
And standing in the night garden, I wondered
what’s unknowable beyond science, synapses firing.
Hunting for shadows of planets, Venus wooed Jupiter,
distance so close. Every time the cat gallops over, rises
on hind legs like a Meer Kat, jumps the tv table,
she swats long tails. When the mouse tunnels through,
she follows. Joan Didion’s husband died one evening
at the dining room table. She thought she might
summon her husband back to life. In my own grief,
I blurred past and present, losing the self I knew.
Couldn’t bring my mother back, though tried in ghost
conversations on daily walks. Perhaps I ran away.
Today, I release my child brain, move close to the tv,
extend my tongue and lick the writhing mouse belly,
kangaroo hind legs, pointed witches with noses
so delicate, diaphanous ears like windowpanes
where I find my mother. Where I find what’s been smuggled
out of this world, past tears in the corners of the sky.
–
Laurel Benjamin is a San Francisco Bay Area native. She is active with the Bay Area Women’s Poetry Salon, curates Ekphrastic Writers, and is a reader for Common Ground Review. She is a winner of the Poet’s Corner Ekphrastic Challenge for 2024, She received Honorable Mention for the Ruben Rose Memorial Poetry Competition, was a finalist for the Cider Press Review Book Award, and received Honorable Mention with Small Harbor Publishing. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Publication credits include Lily Poetry Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Cider Press Review, Mom Egg Review, Nixes Mate, Taos Journal of Poetry, Gone Lawn, West Trestle Review, Of the Book Literary Magazine, Deronda Review, and Rise Up Review, where her work has been recognized. Her work has also been anthologized in Women in a Golden State (2025), The Nature of Our Times: Poems on America’s Land, Waters, Wildlife, and Other Natural Wonders (2025), and Turning a Train of Thought Upside Down: An Anthology of Women’s Poetry (2006). Lily Poetry Salon has featured her. Laurel holds an MFA from Mills College.
© 2025, Laurel Benjamin
Halfway Down the Stairs 