new blog

moved.  but not improved.  eventually someone will design it for me.  for now.  it's just wordsy.

www.laurenekraft.com

Morning Run

The only really good pain

Is the kind you give yourself.

Like putting red-cold thighs

Into a tub of hot water.

This morning I ran in the crackle fresh snow

Of mid-January,

Not to feel pain,

But to feel known

By something other than a lover

A few times, I stopped, just long enough to

Fix my clothes into a place where

Nothing was exposed.

Where I stopped just long enough

To feel the sweat chill at the base of my pony tail.

I am no new animal

And it comforts me

To know that I’m one of a

Billion living things

That sought out a snow cold morning,

When a warm den is the only thing

Keeping us from connecting to the everything,

Or the nothing.

(Depending on what you’re after.)

I’m glad that it can make us laugh,

Or cackle,

Or chirp,

On a morning where warmth

Is not the only thing.

if it's possible to be sleeping
and smiling
at the same time
that's what i'm doing now

Radical Honesty

New Job, Model Citizen
Gonna need to get out of here soon.  Just had my one year review last week.  It was the kind of day that makes you wonder why you don't always say exactly what you're thinking to everyone, even the people who terrify you.  I know, it's not an everyday possibility. But, boy is it good to say all the things you have been stewing with for seven months.
The result of which dramatic and surprising.  Dramatic? no, Dickensian!  Like taking Scrooge back in time to Fezziwig's party to witness the apathy of his past.  
I read back a transcript of a conversation I had with my boss in September:   It involved a conversation in which i told her i was stressed, but had no intention of jumping ship.  She had said, "Maybe it wouldn't be the worst thing if you jumped ship."
She covered her face.  I didn't mean to make her cry.
"I must have been in a very dark place to have said that to you."
Wut?  It wasn't the reaction I had expected.  In the end, I ended up consoling her.  Honestly, I had gone in with a "burn the mother down" kind of attitude.  Feeling that I had some other job possibilities lined up, I thought I had nothing to lose.
This experience has charged in me a dangerous desire to continue to live on the edge of radical honesty.
But, I know better.  It doesn't work on everybody.
My sister would be more likely to punch me than experience the Dickensian catharsis that happened with bossypants.  I've been holding a lot in about that situation.  I know she doesn't really use the internet other than research for work, so I can guarantee she's not reading this.  And as much as I'd like to tempt fate and tell her all the things I've been thinking, I think I'll save all this truthiness for people I barely know.
 

love is all

A small text from my father tonight,

Was enough to make me cry to the point of hiccuping exhaustion:

 “Life is fleeting.  Love is all.”

Now, in bed,

 I am taking everyone I love

And letting them get shot in the street,

 In my mind,

Until that part of my brain is rubbed raw,

And my chest aches from momentarily believing it’s true.

Sometimes I have to picture everything gone

So I know that it’s there. 

LIFE UNDERWATER
I started wearing a heart rate monitor
All the time
I got it originally to figure out my threshold on the bike
I haven’t gotten around to doing that yet
When I first put it on
I guess it hadn’t made proper contact
 I looked down at the watch
It blipped a tiny radiating pulse like a submarine Doppler
Searching for a beat
My friend pulled my shirt up licked the sensor and stuck it back to the place just beneath my breast
I laughed
There it was

Now when I walk
I look at my wrist obsessively
Dick Tracy waiting for a secret message

I am thirty now
And I worry, nightly; I will be too old too soon
To be a mother
I worry that I am a child

I interpreted an ultrasound
For a deaf person
A communication with the beyond
The doctor searched for the right spot
Made contact
And I heard the muffled, galloping sound
Of someone trying to survive underwater
I opened and closed my fist to show her the rhythm of a pulse

 I have no god
And I don’t want one
But what I do want is a sign
That I am alright

Tonight I sit on top of a closed toilet and watch water fill the bath
The best part of the day
A reentry to the womb
Right before I get in
I remember myself
I unhook the monitor from my ribs
And get in
Submerged, I listen for the galloping
But hear only neighbors
Shifting furniture downstairs

When I’m done I can’t help the compulsion
To put it back on
And when I do I get the message

tea stain

picked up and dunked horizontally
steeped a darker brown
on the elbow and the knee
dumbfounded

one side numb
one side wondering what the other has become