Sagittarius
to the conception of my son in 1981
It began with the sun and TristanTzara
and your black hair and progressed to
garter-belts and pierced labia and an obsessive
fascination with a mutual dream of perfection
or a clear glint of similar traumas to cling to
for safety. Even our silences were delicate nails across the skin an awesome sensation our spirits
clung to over the phone from L.A. to San
Francisco. It was an ideal affair, never meeting
the loved one never touching flesh just an orgy
of sounds and speculations. I sent you a
chocolate-chip cookie for Christmas.
You gave me your voice and a promise
to come to my cave, compare scars
we said and translucent skin.
Half man half horse you paced the floor
and whinnied and spoke eloquent
absurdities. We drank whiskey and cough-
medicine and derided Brian Eno and played
with fire. When I got burned you kissed my
neck and for a second I saw your gentility—gentle giant whose lips I could reach only by standing
on my pink cushioned chair. But love gave you
a stomach-ache and fear made you buck
and throw me to the ground breaking my
ass and jostling my vision. When I gathered myself back together you were gone, dashed off
to your street art, to shoot the heads off baby
dolls and stuff dead meat into hollow canons
and watch it all explode.
Our sensibilities collided.
I was never good with animals
but animals were always good
with me: Fertile Pegasus, innocent stud
of circumstance you left me
a permanent reminder not of you, not
of you, but of life that happy pool
of possibilities.
Condemned To Serenity What Will I Make of It?
This is the era destined to the intermittence of a language unburdened of words and dispossessed, the silent halt of that to which without obligation one must nonetheless answer.
(Blanchot from The Writing of the Disaster)
Seventy years ago the wind wove its metallic threaded
copy-right tapestry around my newborn skin. Do you
believe in fate? In youth, beauty-marks were the
trademark constellations, omens we traced and counted
on summer afternoons, like Scrooges computing our booty, we were a s
mall tribe of little girls still with perfect petalled pudendum under
clean white cotton undies studying with scrutiny the map of our
destinies revealed by the moles on shoulders and arms while the sun,
that golden schoolmarm, kept watch as if paid
to keep us from harm, we were sequestered
in the tranquility of our designated suburban street.
The wind and sun made its permanent mark: a welt
of auspiciousness on my heart, a scarred aorta seen on any x-ray, would
prove my destiny: condemned to serenity what will I make of it as the
world falls
apart, as birds sing in a noisy chorus in my yard
and once again, I’m cloistered and safe in a summer
of late middle-age and affluence—is it a prison or a song to be shared
with the aching world, the way our little-girl melodies once
unknowingly rose up over the top of our neighborhood and floated to
the Detroit
slums, to the cemeteries of all our Jews, and rested in the air wafting
over limp lynched black bodies hanging from moss-shrouded trees and
steel bridges somewhere in the South, then spun round the millions of emaciated corpses being hauled away in China to hide Mao’s colossal
failure as a farmer, curled over mountains to the victims of Stalin’s
terror and we didn’t have a clue our voices would carry because we
were unaware air could not be partitioned or that voices don’t fade but
hang forever in space; didn’t know the Big-Bang roar was still ringing
all around us in microwave
reverberations like some rescuer’s call, but were clueless as any kid
raised-up post-war and spoon-fed
the fables of inherent freedom and, freckles and all, we knew to fight
against all wars—then decades later
I find myself again wed to serenity. And now
what will I make of it in this tumultuous world
but to believe these lyrics will rise high enough
to sustain us all.
Laurie Lessen Reiche
Laurie is a writer and artist from San Francisco who now lives in London. She received her BA in English with honours, as well as her Masters of Humanities from Dominican University of California. She is the author a book of poetry called The Dance of the Carbon Atom published with Mellen Poetry Press. She is the recipient of numerous awards such as First Place for best poem in the Riverrun Literary Publication of the University of Colorado Poetry Competition and won The International Charlotte Newberger Poetry Prize sponsored by Lilith Magazine. In 2020 she was nominated for a Pushcart. Her work has been featured in many magazines such as Phoebe: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Feminist Scholarship, The Dalhousie Review, The Plains Poetry Review, Princeton Arts Review, and Southern Poetry Review, among others.
These poems were recited during the Birkbeck Open MIC Night in December 2025.