Return to Current Issue Cover Page

In Our Breath

A poem by
Laura McCullough

"It is not astonishing
when the scared little girl in them
says here I am, or when they weep."
~ Beautiful Women, Stephen Dunn

In Our Breath

"BEAUTY BROKEN DOWN" copyright 2006 by SARAH FREER

Maybe it will be a woman;
maybe she will not wear make-up;
maybe she will be middle-aged.
You will see translucent skin

taut across a sharp cheek bone
and notice one, small blue vein.
It will start singing a lullaby
if you listen. Her skin is made

up of many colors, and this line
is the first on the map into her
wilderness where roses drop
because they simply can't bear

themselves any longer; we exhale
because we can't stand immortality
and are all thieves willing to trade
whatever we've stolen, the price

too steep, the currency of beauty
gone with one breath; at the end
of each exhale, there is silence,
luminous and transitory as sin.

Copyright 2006 by Laura McCullough

Laura McCullough Laura writes:
I've been deeply influenced by Stephen Dunn, and his poem about beauty and aging. This poem touches on some of his recurrent themes. I couldn't help using this epigraph of one of my favorite poems of his.

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.

Return to Poetry index