CITY LANTERN

In the hotel where I’ll meet my friend and her father, 
a glass sculpture called City Lantern stands near the desk 
and elevators, mirroring comings and goings, but fragmented 
so a forearm mimics pliers, a cut-off face haunts from the past. 
Upstairs I knock on the door and she answers, long earrings 
dangling from round ocean discs pierced to the ears. She has to 
apply lipstick, paste on thick eyelashes, the style in her New York 
neighborhood, she’s told me. We’re going out for pork bao 
at a little place in Chinatown where we’ll wait on a long line, 
and I’ll stare back at people who stare at my friend, because 
She’s dolled up, I can hear my mother say. And I know my friend 
wants the attention, though she can’t see them seeing her. Maybe 
if they were more polite they’d pretend to talk to each other 
or at the reflection of the shop window. She has a way 
of hearing—no that’s not it—knowing, in a needle-nose way, 
or as she’s said, I see colors, though she’s been blind 
since a baby. What is it to have no way of salvaging sight 
except through the voice, the hands. She picks up the edge 
of her lavender silk jacket with her thumb and forefinger 
and rubs softly, as she shivers, while we stand, 
waiting to order something succulent. 

Laurel Benjamin is the author of Flowers on a Train (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2025), a finalist for the Cider Press Book Award and an Honorable Mention for the Small Harbor Publishing Laureate Prize. A San Francisco Bay Area poet, she is active with the Women’s Poetry Salon, curates Ekphrastic Writers. and is a reader for Common Ground Review. Publications: Pirene’s Fountain, Lily Poetry Review, Cider Press Review, Taos Journal of Poetry, Mom Egg Review, Gone Lawn, Nixes Mate. She invented a secret language with her brother. Read her work at: laurelbenjamin.com