Lauren K. Carlson

You Appear To Be Only A Name

When it’s never severed
gold stretches.

Therefore, if, as Frost asserts
gold is nature’s hardest

hue to hold
perhaps he should consider

this a matter of physics.
Grasp whisps.

Evidenced by the slightest
remnant vein, love

an elemental, irreducible
gold unnamed.

What’s weightless
will not fray.


** Title is taken from a line in Merwin’s “To the Light Of September”

Lauren K. Carlson is a poet and spiritual director living in Manistee, Michigan. She is the author of Animals I Have Killed (Comstock Review’s Chapbook Prize 2018). Her work has recently appeared in Crab Creek Review, Salamander Magazine, Terrain, The Windhover, and Waxwing. In 2022 she won the Levis Stipend from Friends of Writers for her manuscript in progress. Her writing has been supported by Tin House, Napa Valley Writers Conference and Sewanee Writers Conference. She currently serves as editor for Tinderbox Poetry Journal and holds an MFA in poetry from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.

https://www.laurenkcarlson.com/