Founded in the fall of 1991, Laurel Moon is Brandeis' oldest, national literary publication. Each issue we publish features original work from undergraduate students.
The lake glimpsed through the trees
is my mother’s grief:
enormous, hidden, buried
behind years of growth and obstruction.
The trees are the gap
between us and the lake,
between the object and the grief itself.
She tucks salted peanuts and slices of cheese
into plastic bags, and she offers them to me.
We talk about the lake,
its beauty and its invisibility.
She does not offer me the lake.
It is not hers to offer.
It is my grief, too,
my future, and one day I will
wade in. I will pull swaths of denim
from my bare skin only for the suction
to reseal again and again,
slurping with every fresh tug.
So we talk about the lake.
We do not state the obvious:
that we are drowning in it.
We eat the peanuts she brought
to share.