Poetry by Laura Ingram

                         Chiara Cremaschi CC



Creation Myth of the Honor’s Student

                              (Fifteen)
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               At fifteen I’d soak in the bathtub until my skin pruned purple, swaddle into a sweater,
eyes shut, and pretend I had just been born, wailing at my reflection, the first thing I’d encounter.
I’d stay to see me standing there, so thin, scrape the sugared pink top of my sadness with my
teeth, swallow it like a wad of bubblegum, even knowing it’d be seven years before it would pass
through my body, my body born as the runt in a litter of stars, my body delivered in the
penumbra, doused in earthshine, conceived as a lump in the cosmos’s throat.

                  I am my own daughter. 

               At fifteen my hair came out in handfuls and I hadn’t had my first kiss. At fifteen girls
stopped their sacred rituals of painting their eyes like evening over porcelain sinks to ask me
What’s Your Secret and I’d pretend to not know what they were talking about, dumping my
sandwich in the wastebasket on the way out. 
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             At fifteen I’d come home from school hungry enough to eat the yellow yolk of sun with a
slice of buttered sky, go to bed thirsty for mother’s milk of Andromeda, holding onto my
hipbones like handrails as I descend the staircase to dreams.

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Laura Ingram is a tiny girl with big glasses and bigger ideas. Her poetry and prose have been published in over sixty magazines and journals, among them Gravel, Tallow Eider Quarterly, and Glass Kite anthology. Laura's first book, a collection of poetry, was released May 2018 with Desert Willow Press, and her second book, a children's story, was released August 2018 with Nesting Tree Books of Raven Publishing. Laura is a creative writing undergraduate and part-time editor. Harry Styles once gave her his water bottle.

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