Memorial Day
From here they fly out—
fly in—temporal moorings of tide and sea mist.
This is the day of remembrance
when you sat at the kitchen table eating toast.
You were so real
with your talk of faraway places, and
almost gone. Was it for honor?
(Soldier. Husband.) Was it escape?
Barnacles breathe under the weight of water
as grief held tight and home clutched to rock.
My silence is caught in sail, out from a ledge—
with absence holed up in a chest like a bullet.
Laura Schaeffer’s poetry has been published in The Pitkin Review, Tidepools, Ars Poetica, Currents, Poetry Corners, Pif Magazine, Collective Visions Gallery, Hole in the Head Review, The Far Field, Medicine and Meaning, and Cantos. She is a graduate of Goddard College’s MFA Creative Writing Program and received her undergraduate degree in English/Creative Writing from the University of Washington. Laura has taught workshops to alumni and at community centers, including a nine-month poetry class for teens in which she obtained grants to produce a CD of their work. She has attended the Centrum Writers Conference on a full scholarship and continues her interests in international poetry and nature. Laura lives in Port Townsend, WA.