Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Four November-December 2024
Autumn Polyphony, poems by Laura Johanna Braverman.
Autumn Polyphony
We will remember the sirens of ambulances,
their rising and retreating whines along the highway.
Remember the strange frequencies of flying carbon-fiber
structures given calculated intelligence.
Bass implosions that thrum through viscera
and bone. The cresting, breaking waves
of speed surpassing sound.
And still the olives are shaken from the trees,
offering their green and purple fruit –
as they should when earth begins its tilt away from light.
The rhythmic beats of stick against branch –
the practiced movements over years immemorial.
And still the coastal soil is red.
Still, we are all of water made, of mineral –
all held by skin.
Confinement’s Alterations
Through glass I meet the outside now:
eucalyptus trees with swaying fringes,
an oak, fuchsia bougainvillea blooms
at the window’s edge. A white sky,
a flat sea. I imagine jumping in
from where I sit, ignoring for a moment
the probability of sewage in it.
From here, the water is all invitation.
The jetty’s arm reaches across the blue.
Emblazoned at repeated intervals over
white, I see the logo BMA/Paints. Once
a noiseless stone concrete, the quay
used to go unnoticed in this country
of disfigured coastlines. Something I
fantasize about with two broken knees:
hide this small defeat in a covert
operation. Paint it over maybe –
in the darkest hours. Who is with me?
I ask my husband and two sons.
Sometimes I shuffle out, beyond the glass
on my extended arms. Rubber ends
of my crutches like the knuckles
of our primate cousins pressing down.
I am unsteady on the gravel pebbles.
Or I ask my husband if he can push me
in the wheelchair borrowed from his
father – up and down the driveway.
And again – I am a tree, a rosemary
bush, that lizard perched on a rock.
© Laura Johanna Braverman
Laura Johanna Braverman is a writer and artist. She is the author of Salt Water (Cosmographia Books, 2019). Her poems have appeared in Reliquiae, Plume, Levure Litteraire, Rusted Radishes, The Fourth River, and MER, among other journals, and in the anthology Awake in the World, vol. II. She is currently a doctoral candidate in poetry at Lancaster University. A graduate of Rhode Island School of Design, her painting works were exhibited in 2015 (Source), in 2023 at the Mina Image Centre (An Ever-Changing Stream), and in 2024 at Saleh Barakat Gallery (Faith in the Forming). Austro-American by birth and upbringing, she lives in Lebanon with her family.