Founded in the fall of 1991, Laurel Moon is Brandeis' oldest, national literary publication. Each issue we publish features original work from undergraduate students.
bury themselves in stories
Beg to be written
Patiently wait to be spoken into existence
never fearing the common fate of other words not spoken
Your melodies attached to language that
punctuate my childhood
Separating out the days of magic and
the days of you
If she was Harry Potter on school nights
and weekend mornings
then you were commercials that jarringly wove themselves
in between colorful cartoon worlds on the tv screen
The words I carry with me
are those that you spoke as I pretended not to hear
Whether to break or to construct
I carry your words in the narrative to be seen
The words you carry with you
are words I will never understand
Other-worldly words of instruction
The language of Jazz, of the Greats
The words you carry with you are
of Chet Baker, of Miles Davis
Of your father and your father’s father
Words I can never carry with me
Words too vast to understand
Constrained by my own experiences
and by the privilege of what I cannot know
about the death of a brother
The words I carry with me are somber
are tiptoeing around the point as to not disturb
the ornamental fixture of a functional family
Words charged by the ghosts of words undeclared
The Words We Carry With Us
will die unspoken and unseen.