What is it like to live without awareness,
without curiosity
When the last wall of ice slipped like a cannon into the charge of sea?
It’s possible the silence echoed with humanity’s losses.
Artic fishermen would have coiled their nets as their boats nestled on front lawns.
Now foxgloves climb the steering wheel.
Did you understand what you were witnessing?
I imagine you stood on a windswept outcrop jutting like a walrus’ tusk.
Eyes sweeping the horizon like the scope of a submarine.
Earth’s jolt altering you to its finality.
Absorbed as you were in the demands of daily living.
Searching for a lost sock under the bed.
Sweeping counter crumbs into the dustpan of a palm.
Only knowing to look when your neighbor tapped like a tree branch on your window.
The majesty of sheeted ice slipping from human memory like a poorly tied knot
You the last one to see it sparkle with white and blue so neon as to be surreal.
To stand in that bubbled moment and turn toward its breath.
The last innocent thing, such beauty
and then
close your curtains.
—
Laurel Maxwell is a poet from Santa Cruz, CA whose work is inspired by life’s mundane and the natural world. Her work has appeared at baseballballard.com, coffecontrails, phren-z, Verse-Virtual, Tulip Tree Review, and Yellow Arrow Vignette. Her creative fiction was a finalist for Women on Writing Flash Fiction Contest. Her piece A Still Life was nominated for Best of the Net by Yellow Arrow Publishing. She has a chapbook forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2025. When not writing Laurel enjoys putting her feet in the sand, reading, traveling, and trying not to make too much of a mess baking in a too small kitchen. She works in education.
