Poetry by Linda Cooper

     Rich Mason CC




Miniatures

How did we get so small                 surviving our childhoods               separate     
                          although we grew up in the same home                          our inner lives 
startling and poisonous     oleander’s tiny white flowers       a box jellyfish 
              tentacles loaded                    everything is not learned             but innocence 
can be struck down              you walked in circles in the basement                while 
              I rocked myself in bed         and tried not to see            lines wave and rise 
ch-ch-ch up the wall            we are still so small               forget-me-nots                    blue
                           drops in the sea                     ocean churns                         scatters            
                                         electric            blue                 light






Living Water

Here’s to the blanket falling from
your shoulders. The moon’s eye
blink at dawn. Here’s to the moment

you wake in a stranger’s bed, dizzy
and unsure of how you got there
to begin with. Salud. Here’s to the first drink. 

To the wilderness of disappointment,
stacks upon stacks, accordion folders
at maximum expansion. Here’s to loneliness.

To ordinary harm. To dim warnings. Repeated.
Here’s to the little girl with enormous
dreams. To shattering. To bible verses

and song lyrics and lullabies and fairy tales
and nursery rhymes and epic tales
whose epilogues are lesser and smaller

and more burdensome. To these voices
who tell the girl she is but gesture
or consolation. Here’s to living water.

To fragile vessels. To the notion of vessels. 
To the labeling of what’s inside them.
Here’s to the weight of birthright 

and privilege. To the so-called.
The inevitable. Here’s to initiation. To struggle. 
To setbacks. Here’s to almost impossible. 

Almost.  

​


Linda Cooper lives in Ronald, Washington and teaches creative writing at Washington Outdoor School. She completed her MFA at Eastern Washington University and her poems have been published in Verse Daily, Hayden’s Ferry Review, West Branch, Many Mountains Moving, Willow Springs, Third Coast, Tupelo Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, Permafrost, Hubbub, Elixir, Diner, Pontoon, and many more. She also won the 2015 Orlando Prize for Poetry and the 2022 Allied Arts Foundation Prize. Her chapbook, Blue, a Waltz, was published by Floating Bridge Press in 2023.