Perennial I pray out loud too. As dune grasses pray, with their empty, crisp, quivers. I’m bound, like anything else alive in winter, to attempt survival. Torn stem. Berries. Gull prints lonesome for life’s evidence. Sunlight pools, wilts leftover snow and where sand shifts ground, I imagine warm pockets. Contained. Underneath, new stems heed nothing, not even cold.
Lauren Carlson is the author of a chapbook Animals I Have Killed which won the Comstock Writers Group chapbook prize in 2018. Her work has been published in Pleiades, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The Windhover, and Blue Heron Review among others. She recently graduated with an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson, the first low residency program in the United States. https://laurenkcarlson.com/
Amethyst Review 