IN THE CRUX

I clawed the cracked clay at the winter art bazaar. 
Said, who would buy it, a student mistake 
and how the kiln read it, clay waking, 

finding itself alive. Once, I saw a lunar eclipse 
after sandwiches and red wine. We’d swum the lake 

then shivered, one hand holding up a towel, the other 
grasping flimsy plastic eyeglasses against 

the red clay planet. We made love when everyone left. 
And the sky– it was like the clay I’d once thrown in ceramics 
where slip spun like two people dancing, hands 

together then away, dry skin a paper sound. The sound 
of no one dancing at my wedding. Pencil scribbles at night. 

Today, I’m forming dough into ginger molasses cookies, 
lump resting in the refrigerator an hour, then roll 
each ball into sugar crystals, and finally place 

on parchment-lined metal sheets. They’ll spread, flat 
crinkled. Like love when everyone leaves.

At Girl Scout Camp, clay beads formed and fired 
then strung, tucked under a blouse, held them 
in trees not in guidebooks. On one hike 

the counselor swung from the tree. And the sky, 
like clay once thrown. After camp I gave the necklace 

to my mother. She wore the beads until 
the color wringed out. Later, I discovered the beads. 
She’d died and I broke the lock of her jewelry box. 

Laurel Benjamin is a San Francisco Bay Area native, where she invented a secret language with her brother. She has work  in Lily Poetry Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, Sky Island Journal, Turning a Train of Thought Upside Down: An Anthology of Women’s Poetry, among others. Affiliated with the Bay Area Women’s Poetry Salon and Ekphrastic Writers, she holds an MFA from Mills College. She is a reader for Common Ground Review and has featured in the Lily Poetry Review Salon. She was nominated for Best of the Net by Flapper Press in fall 2022.