Laura Page: Drove a Stake Through a Man’s Skull

Dear Starship,

I envy your ease,

sailing through ether.

Down here, the fawns are happy,

but their white spots

are as the few getting fewer.

The red crowding is want

and the valleys keep saying things.

The last thing the valley said

to the fawn closest,

which was me,

was whispered:

you’re not the blackbird,

the starship.

ii.

The loving

in all the wanting

and learning to touch the wanting

as little as possible, while still saying to it,

over and over—you’re good, you’re lovely—

What is that?

Nothing so banal as life, please.

And not grace, either.

iii.

Star-thing, to get at me,

you’ll have to peel the prayers away.

My mother’s.

My cousin’s.

My lover’s.

What if I am only that, still, underneath—?

a prayer.

And whose?

I joked I was the prophetess,

but not the one who drove a stake

through a man’s skull.

Just one

painting fawns for no reason.

Is a fawn a prayer?

Where’s her homing beacon,

Her starship?

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Laura Page is a poet and artist from the Pacific Northwest. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust + Moth, Crab Creek Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Unbroken, The Hunger, Minola Review, TINGE, and others. Her chapbook,epithalamium was awarded Sundress Publications' 2017 chapbook prize. Laura is editor in chief of Virga Magazine.