Founded in the fall of 1991, Laurel Moon is Brandeis' oldest, national literary publication. Each issue we publish features original work from undergraduate students.
Here’s the tenth day on the tenth month as in ‘scale of one to’ here’s strokes from a nerve-bitten
nail bed like little blades of grass walt gave us like the little blades in a pencil sharpener keeping
language sharp here’s how sharp a language cuts when all the soft-dust words get vacuumed up
in a bad wake off the ocean’s silty bottom leaving back the black granite and obsidian glass
shrapnel like broken glass in shag carpets when you hurled wine glasses at my head like how that
was only a few months after I love you and how quick that word got vacuumed up how that word
started to feel too soft rather than too honest how after that blood falls and the wine gets
paper-toweled and the hugs get given and the stitches heal you slip on micro-crystals of a new
kind of sharp and small here’s how ten seconds carves itself a new cave between your ears like
how badly it hurts to run on a broken-glass-shag-salad toward someone throwing glass at you
here’s how gnawing off a shard of my finger and spinning it in my lip rips me a new ten seconds
instead of facing those ten and here’s ten words to keep on yourself at all times
How sharply carving,
love, depending entirely
on our softest tongue
Sam Richards is from Bristol, Maine, and primarily writes from lived experience as a poet of witness both to his own life, as well as the lives of those he feels representative of his place within the greater 21st century diaspora/despair. Currently enrolled at Brandeis University, in the undergraduate Psychology department.