Before the Trout
The lake is fuzzy with algae, shapes leaning against leaves, drowning like fabric strewn together. Today, borders fill with bullrush and cattails, then willows, blurred corners chasing corners, or a high school graduation dress with a queen’s anne lace border, the suffuse pattern of a survivalist. A century later this will become a land mass, where adults can cross back to childhood. Not all lakes come from rivers, some currents hidden. Sometimes trillium stiffen at the approach of wind, pointed hats unmovable. The woods surrounding the lake at this early hour—no evidence of claws, no whistles. And I think of my brother. If he were older, would I insist less and he offer more, instead of his pangs, as if I was his mother. But I don’t birth tragic heroes. Or does he wish for some casual lean-on-a boulder pose? Like the time fishing with our father. There aren’t enough pangs before the trout, not enough before the wind dies down.
reeling in pink-green
a punctured drunken fish
reflection like moonbeams
Laurel Benjamin is the author of Flowers on a Train (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2025), a finalist for the Cider Press Book Award and an Honorable Mention for the Small Harbor Publishing Laureate Prize. A San Francisco Bay Area poet, she is active with the Women’s Poetry Salon and is a reader for Common Ground Review. She founded and leads Ekphrastic Writers, a group dedicated to writing and community. Publications: Pirene’s Fountain, Lily Poetry Review, Cider Press Review, CALYX, Taos Journal of Poetry, Mom Egg Review, Gone Lawn, Nixes Mate. Her work has also been anthologized in Gunpowder Press’ Women in a Golden State (2025), The Nature of Our Times (2025), among others. Laurel holds an MFA from Mills College. She invented a secret language with her brother. Read her work at: laurelbenjamin.com
The Marbled Sigh 