Looking back,
I’ve caught her in mid-air,
the girl in this picture. What’s left
of summer— loose gold
in an upsurge of hair,
a scalp-bounced, tree-ward, throng drawn
all the way from her soles
against the snap-back, shallow give
of backyard earth, stretched
spring to spring, then trampoline-ing
up and out. Her mouth, a tunnel—
mid-word gone dark, bliss at the corner
of her lips, just an upswing, an almost
exhale. One eye hidden in the reverb
of tangled bangs, the other caught
like the wing-arc of a coasting bird;
a caged gaze, a defiance, a dare.
Kinetic. No netting necessary.
Laura Sobbott Ross has worked as a teacher and a writing coach for Lake County Schools and was recently named as Lake County’s first poet laureate. Her poetry appears in many journals, including Blackbird, Florida Review, and 32 Poems. She was a finalist for the Art & Letters Poetry Prize and won the Southern Humanities Auburn Witness Poetry Prize. Her poetry chapbooks are A Tiny Hunger and My Mississippi. A third book, The Graffiti of Pompeii, was released in December.