“Range after range of mountains.
Year after year after year.
I am still in love.”
― Gary Snyder

Laurie Higi lives and writes on a chicken farm in South Whitley, Indiana. She has a Bachelor of Arts in English Writing from Indiana University-Purdue University, Fort Wayne. Her chapbook, The Universe of Beaver Lake, was published by Finishing Line Press. Her poetry has appeared in The Dandelion Review, Confluence Literary Magazine, Surreal Beauty Magazine, and Bohemia Art Magazine. She has also published work in Reality Serum Magazine and Landlocked Lyres Literary Magazine. She enjoys being surrounded by flowers, clouds, and stars with her family, on their farm. Laurie joins us via Zoom from her home.

Welcome to the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey. Laurie, what poems have you brought for us?

Butterflies and Empty Books

This cornucopia is crammed
Full of butterflies and empty
Books. I try to make space
By filling the books with ink.

I am careful not to pull
Wings off of butterflies,
Though part of me wants so bad
To examine them. Find words
To describe, in these empty books,
Every color, spot, line antenna.

Maybe tattoo it on my fingernail,
The one that I see with.
Put it next to the star,
The fire, the fish, and the lake
Named after a beaver.


Open to Your Dew

I’m starting to grow out
Of you,
My favorite pair of old jeans
Worn so right
Holes appear in all the wrong places.

And I could kiss you,
Rock of Gibraltar,
My eye a moist clamp,
So tight.
My lip open
To your dew.

With all the passion
Of so deeply wishing
For something,
Not this amazing Canadian
Summer, but long winter,
Pure white snow.

And I write cut off metaphors
While blaring Led Zeppelin for inspiration,
Like you, white trash intellectual.
One minute cussing like a broken toe,
The next picking constellations out of Ontario
Night skies a half a pack of cigarettes
North of Toronto.
Canada in Common

As I write of stars and cinnamon,
The past that I live,
Past that blacks out
The present, mortalizes the future,

You walk in, with Ontario
And independence on my mind,
You talk of your cabin in Toronto.

Canada in common.

You won’t let me push you
Away like some dog starved
For attention. Now I don’t want to.
My life finally coming together,
The perfect mixture of night,

Day when dusk,
I tear up at the beauty of it.
We talk of Canada. Our own
Canada’s collide.


More Vulnerable than Me

The conjugation of soft, comfortable love
Into hunger for old times past.
Where there used to be this incandescent
Glow of everything I ever wanted,
I replace it with this flame
And the peculiar way it wraps
Itself around my neck.
Not choke,
But some other verb.

As I proudly sang of love I knew
Nothing about,
The present extinguisher made this fire
More vulnerable than me
And this verb changed to smoking.


Infinite Navy Blue Ocean

Today, you showed me
Your Canada. An aerial view.
More evergreen fingers
Reaching towards me,
Pulling me into blue lakes.
Less cabins, intense beauty
Of simplicity.

I can imagine how breath-giving
Night is there.
Completely outshining Ontario
With less light.

Now, after two days of you
I can’t scrub your smell
From me.
It shouldn’t be hard
To admit that
I love you, today, yesterday,
Last week.

To share Canada with you.
You ask me about these poems,
My brilliant fish,
My secret fire.

You’ve interrupted this universe
I’ve created for myself.
You’ve become the first
To penetrate my skin.

I try to deny that I want you
Here, lying on the dock,
Fingers intertwined
Towards those stars,
Shining fish swimming
Through this infinite
Navy blue ocean.

You've been listening to poems by Laurie Higi on the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey.