"Earthbind" by Laura Post
He asks me casually if I ever want to get married, and I
think about how I can’t even stand guided tours.
A little girl at the top of the jungle
gym shrieks, “Housekeeping!”
imperiously
at the children in the sandbox below.
Mira tells me
her second day of medical school was a human dissection lab.
While trying to make an incision, she looked down and realized
she’d been holding the cadaver’s hand.
I move to Ohio in another attempt
to trap and release myself.
I will do something
ridiculous. I
will do something.
Drinking beer and trying to split open
an acorn squash,
I drive the thin white blade
of a knife deep into my thumb.
What can love do
in the hands of the fearful?
Featured Art: "Going for Water" by Julia S. Powell.
Laura Post is from New Jersey. Her work has appeared in The Moth Magazine, Switchback, Your Impossible Voice, New South, The Squaw Valley Review, and elsewhere. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram at @ultrasoap.
Julia Powell lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts and holds degrees from Stanford and Yale. Julia has recently been profiled in Boston Magazine, with her paintings also featured in Marie Claire magazine and Architectural Digest. She was chosen as the VIP print artist for the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) Boston 2017 Summer Gala. Previous VIP prints artists have paintings in the permanent collection of the MFA Boston. In 2017, her painting Haiku was accepted into the juried 2017 MFA Boston Summer Auction Show. In 2016, Julia’s painting Birch Series 6 was accepted into the juried MFA Boston Summer Auction Show and was the highest-selling and most bid-on painting at the auction. Her artwork was also featured on the television show The Mindy Project (formerly on FOX and Hulu). Her paintings can also be found in many private collections across the United States, Canada, Europe South America and Asia. She is represented by Abigail Ogilvy Gallery in Boston, Massachusetts. You can find her work on her website, juliaspowell.com, and on Instagram at @juliaspowellart.