by Laura Lentz | Oct 17, 2021 | OXYGEN: Poetry for Survival & Thriving
We were in the hot tubs at Esalen in Big Sur – not the old hot tubs, but the new tubs that were rumored cost $20 million to drill into the cliffs after a storm washed away the old tubs, after my friend who was teaching there during that storm had to take a...
by Laura Lentz | Oct 17, 2021 | LOVE & SEXUALITY, OXYGEN: Poetry for Survival & Thriving
The man I loved had been dead a year. I felt like a young widow catching men in my web of sorrow. I grieved through thighs and back and mouth and hair. I had entered the shadowy life of Philadelphia nightclubs in the 80’s, ending every night with a man in my bed after...
by Laura Lentz | Oct 17, 2021 | OXYGEN: Poetry for Survival & Thriving
A young woman stood in my kitchen and said, Kauai won’t be teaching me any lessons. She had been visiting two days, dropped her purse in the middle of the living room, drank too much, flipped her hair when she spoke. I wanted to warn her – take the words back,...
by Laura Lentz | Oct 11, 2021 | OXYGEN: Poetry for Survival & Thriving, WRITING AT RED LIGHTS
L. couldn’t find her voice to tell us that awful thing had happened to her. We were all twelve, but L. had breasts while Val and I waited for our lives to begin by willing ours to grow. When L. walked into our homes, our brothers stared and our fathers looked the...
by Laura Lentz | Aug 25, 2021 | OXYGEN: Poetry for Survival & Thriving
Each June we went to the edge of the Atlantic with blankets and sunscreen and cigarettes and hoagies with extra oil, wrapped in wax paper. Each year our blankets touched the blankets of strangers, and each year we ran with abandon, that first day, into her large...
by Laura Lentz | Aug 25, 2021 | OXYGEN: Poetry for Survival & Thriving
The palm fronds are listening Because I have something to say. They fall with a thud, trying to talk back but my computer is blaring poetry and I am lost in the noise of the hunting dogs. When I’m drowning in sorrow the branches of the trees reach for me. I walk...
