Weekly Poem: ‘The House on Laurel Hill Lane’

By Megan Snyder-Camp

Between the neighbor’s cherry trees
a hat wove through spokes of fruit.
Small birds unshook from the pages of trees.

She went in, laid out plates and glasses, let old news
foam the room. At midnight the phone would ring
only to click aside. How about a sandwich,

he would say, how about some milk.
These miles of threaded oyster beds,
of just-for-show chimneys. How about
these tinted windows? How when the shore
skirted pails, hollows, then stranded razor clams one by one?

They ate well. Even as the words
shifted on her tongue, as the new pitch
caught hold inside her,
as sand rounded out the garage.

She knew when love unwound her but not how.
Let your hair down over the briar patch,
she read to her daughter from the little golden book,
the two tales sewing each other up.

Megan Snyder-Camp is the author of “The Forest of Sure Things,” which won the Tupelo Press/Crazyhorse Award for an outstanding first book.