Two Poems by Laura Sobbott Ross

Poetry – Issue 13 | September 2011

Stoned Wallabies Blamed for Australian Crop Circles

News Headline Poppy Fields of Tasmania

When the joey’s jaw had grown
enough to unclench
from his mother’s swollen teat,
he would find a thread of light
in his furred room—

a womb with walls too thin
to hold back the westerly winds
whipping off the buttongrass moors,
or the distant scent of eucalyptus,
whitecaps and wild peppermint.

And when he nosed his way out
one night, it was not hunger
he felt, but petals in a field.
As if he could define a field
as this voluminous plane
teeming with stalks and stars,
so much red, so much silent
plundering. His own veins

lit in a raucous cradlesong
of seedpods oozing moon milk.
The mob tamping
the sweet, tangled poppies
into circles so succinct
it would puzzle the farmers
as to what was spelled out there
in ecstatic reiterations to the sky.

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Laura Sobbott Ross was born in Mississippi by way of Venezuela. She lives on a peninsula, but loves islands, including St. Lucia, Grenada, and Bora Bora, where she got married. She hopes one day to visit Greece and Patagonia. Her poetry appears in Calyx, Florida Review, Natural Bridge, Tar River Poetry, and The Valparaiso Review, among others. Read her chapbook, A Tiny Hunger by Yellow Jacket Press.

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Literary Bohemian

Poetry – Issue 13 | September 2011