Two Poems by Laura Winton

Lost Summer

Rain follows me wherever I go.

I pull clouds behind
me on sky-high kite strings. Lightning
curls my hair, locks rolled in
cumulus curlers everything
I touch turns to storm:
soccer fields into swimming
pool mudholes, lakes, stagnant
mangers birth mosquito cities;
roads wash
out leaving me
           no way home
and children tick
           worthless days, counting
backwards lost bicycle hours and home
runs unhit. Grey is the backdrop
to heaven, a channel off
the air, shows canceled into
white fuzz and all
           because
I cannot stop
                       raining.

Ten thousand

Someday I will be worthy of my ten thousand ideals

cast off my puny small gods and their
incense dances their
silent lotus supplications I will
learn to speak
in your tongue with gifts of understanding
great visions your dreams become mine
I will build you
tall monuments and skyscrapers
from children’s blocks with bumps
and ridges prefabulated where
pilgrims once swung an axe.

Always you demand the impossible the

counterclockwise moment before apology.
Someday I will cease to live in present tense to speak in first person to
sit finally inside the quiet house watching for shadows
beneath the door.

Laura Winton is a poet and a spoken word and performance artist currently living in Minneapolis. She has performed her work in New York, Chicago, and London in addition to the Minnesota Twin Cities and her poetry has been published in dozens of little magazines and websites around the country. She also published Karawane: Or, the Temporary Death of the Bruitist, a journal of experimental performance texts from 1997-2008. She is also an academic whose work is on the liberation of the imagination as a political act. She likes Dada, Surrealism, and any writing that is not immediately understood by the conscious mind.