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Another Valediction for Morning

Another Valediction for Morning

A poem by Laura McCullough

He was missing one arm and had a prosthetic.
He was missing one leg, just above the knee,

and had a prosthetic. It was summer, and he
wore shorts and a tank top, and on his revealed

skin were skin-colored patches reflecting light
as if from a cast-off mannequin or a wet tar road.

This was an ordinary day, in an ordinary grocery
store, and nothing was revealed except the sun

had come up again for both this man and me —
except that's not accurate: once more we had

hurtled toward morning and made it, risen on
the curve of another day that promised nothing

exceptional. When my cart was full, I stood in
line at the check out, the young woman handling

the food looking bored, the young man at the bag
end eyeing her from lids browned too early. And

the man, he was at the self-check out, cursing hard,
then laughing, the red light above him spinning

like a lighthouse on a dark shore. Another day
had begun. The shudders on the small window

in my chest burst open, like a grape against my
gums, and something like light came flooding in.

Copyright 2006 by Laura McCullough

Laura McCullough Laura writes:
Here's a nod toward Keats and Thomas, and one of a series of poems in the manuscript, Mirror Neuron, that blend lyric and narrative. I had fun with this poem.

Laura McCullough graduated with a BA from The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, and holds an MFA in Writing and Literature from Goddard College. She has been a New Jersey State Arts Council Fellow, won a Geraldine R. Dodge Scholarship to attend the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and was the 2005 Prairie Schooner Merit Scholar in Poetry at the Nebraska Summer Writers Workshop. She attended the 2005 Bread Loaf writers conference as a contributor. Laura has published poems widely in literary magazines and journals such as Nimrod, Potion, Hotel Amerika, Gulf Coast, Nightsun, Iron Horse Quarterly, Boulevard, The God Particle, Poetry East, Confluence, Exquisite Corpse, Word Riot, Tarpaulin Sky, and others. Her first collection of poems, The Dancing Bear, was published in February, 2006 by Open Book Press with jacket blurbs by Stephen Dunn, Li-young Lee, and BJ Ward. She delivered a paper, “In Defence of Shelley: the New Science of Mirror Neurons and its Implications for a Theory of Poetics” at The Mid American’s 2005 Winter Wheat Writing Festival in Bowling Green. She is a professor of writing at Brookdale Community College in New Jersey, where she chairs the Visiting Writers Series. Laura can be reached via email at: lmccullough@brookdalecc.edu.

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