Laura Sobbott Ross

2008 Creekwalker Poetry Prize Finalist

Laura Sobbott Ross is a graduate of Radford University and works as a freelance architectural designer. She was nominated for a 2007 Pushcart Prize, and has poetry in, or forthcoming, in The Columbia Review, Tar River Poetry, Slow Trains, The Sow’s Kalliope, and Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts, among many others.

Her work has been included in the book Letters to our Fathers from Daughters: A Pathway to Hope and Healing. She has also placed first and second in the Mount Dora, Florida Literary Festival Writer’s Contest, the East Lake County Poetry Contest, and won first place in the Great Blue Beacon Poetry Contest.

She lives in Sorrento, Florida with her husband, daughter and son.

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FOR MY MOTHER

We take the path of scattered stones,
three generations, balancing ourselves
across the shallow, brisk current.
Our reflections in silt and an earthen sky.
We know that the children
will get their feet wet, eventually,
turning stones ankle deep
and hoping to unsettle a nest
of something squirmy into the cold universe
of twinkling minnows.
Their grandmother shows them blackberries
still red with June, and mossy inclines
where floodwaters have striated topsoil
and trees have pitched over painted rocks.
I try to capture their subtle colors
in a photograph, as if to articulate
the pale shading of one to another,
but I can only see my mother's hat,
its sunlit brim spreading like a ripple
through the whitened logs, the wildflowers.
Don't be afraid to fall, she whispers,
in a voice like the red turn of a summer leaf
as we each find our footing,
wobble a little, and then let go.




HUNGER IS AN OCEAN

She came out with the afternoon sun.
The tide, a heavy garment
hanging from her frail, bent frame.
She tossed her baited hook
over waves that stung
at her stomach and waited.
Nothing happened.

How'd you catch so many?
she had asked him.
Fish scales glittering
like flint through pale sand
as he worked his way
through shallow stacks of pink fillets –
whiting, mackerel, pompano.

He knew the fish had scattered now –
a stilled flight into cool branches of deep water,
his shoulders dark with wading
through too many windy dawns to consider.

You want these?  he asked
pointing to the stack of fillets
and drawing the blade of his knife
down the beads of spine
that fell whole like a divining line
into the sand between them.

You know, I really do, she said.



THE ROBINS HAVE COME BACK

It is winter here.
Not like the season
of snow packed culverts or icy glazes.
White is too colorless for reckonings.
Sterile as hospital linens on a bed
where a friend with one breast
waits for another prognosis.

The robins are everywhere.
They have charted topography again,
tapped an ancient compass –
its arrow hardly quivering beneath feathers
bright as blood oranges. Orchards,

palm trees, lakes like sea glass, strawberries
ripening in rows sound as stitched incisions.
These are familiar landmarks now.
The ocean, a bearing east of a migration
scented with smoke and evergreen.

Why this returning? Why this returning
now before nests have twined back
around eggshells the fragile color of sky?

We wait with her for answers,
for the cryptic words of doctors,
while our creek beds, our pastures,
the soft twilight at our windows
teem with melodies sung too soon.



PAPER SNOWFLAKES

We used to hang them in January,
winter's white, fat fingerprints

taped across window panes,
jeweled with condensation.

Tonight my son remembers
how to make paper snowflakes,

although it is April
and soon he will be too old

for snippets angled and sliced
into a multifold of edges.

Humid sheets of paper
that open into delicate lace.

I see arrowheads there,
kites in midair, Christmas pines,

a compass of small, awkward hearts.
Patterns exacted by randomness,

mirrored and transposed.
A labyrinth of things I want

to keep folded in my hands –
star and thorn, seed and hill,

and a boy's sky that burns
in every wing-shaped opening.

Paper Snowflakes has been selected for publication in Tar River Poetry



REFLECTION

Against my window,
a moth presses its white wings,
a tiny heart flailed open.

Beneath the cobalt of twilight
the quick breath of flight,
a small cloud beaded on glass.

And don't I know that feeling –
the inexplicable compulsion
of some path toward

indistinct light,
the full weight of stars
glittering across wings

that shred like paper.
No matter how many times
instinct lifts them up again

and whispers back
into the same pale thundering
of torn edges, fragile fire.


© Copyright Laura Sobbott Ross.  All rights reserved.