Morgan Laidler is a junior at Boston College, where she studies Secondary Education, English, and Creative Writing. She is currently spending a year abroad at the University of Oxford, further deepening her engagement with literature and pedagogy. Born in Atlanta, Georgia, and raised in Parkland, Florida, Morgan began writing poetry and prose at a young age, finding in language both refuge and revelation. Her work explores the subtleties of memory, place, and the emotional landscapes that shape us.
Details of the Almost-Dream
Inspired by Monica Youn’s “Detail of the Rice Chest”
I was driving my car down the Sawgrass,
which usually refers to the blades of green daggers
in the armory of the Everglades that cut you
if you run your hands against them in the wrong way,
but, in this case, refers to the local term for the small
highway that could take you all the way from the
back end of Coral Springs to the entrance of 595.
I drove this way, labeled “south” but technically southeast,
every day, and every day, I passed the newly constructed
and freshly sold condos. I passed them when they were still
hunks of organized rubble, and now their first sets
of jet-lagged snowbirds have arrived. Snowbirds is another local
term for the people who live here in the winter and return
to their northern residences for the summer.
I used to think that north was straight above you.
When I look straight up in the time I am comfortable
referring to as “now,” which may, on second thought,
be the only way I can look, I first see a bright light.
I secondly see a large bag of clear liquid
floating straight above me, to the north.
Anyways, snowbirds tend to be old couples
with pensions and retirement funds and a horde
of grandkids wanting to vacation in Florida.
Not an actual horde, of course. Not in the Mongolian
sense, with men with long hair on horseback barrelling
into some innocent village with innocent people. No,
I mean they probably have more than five grandkids.
I used to think that history was reserved for the past.
Like the hordes of earlier days, I, too, barrel
toward the innocent with my metal armor carrying
me at 95 mph (and about 250 horsepower), and my wheeled
mount is not alone. It hunts with a clan down the sawgrass.
A clan not in the sense that we all know each other,
but more in the way that we are all travelling in the same
direction at the same time towards a similar place.
Someone is taking notes above me now, in the north.
They seem to be taking notes of me, but not in a real way.
In the way that snowbirds take note of the people
who don’t have enough money to hand-pick weather.
The way that the Mongol hordes took note of the villages
they barrelled towards to pillage.
I see a scratch on my arm. It’s red.
I used to think that black was the opposite of white.
Ok, so I’m barrelling down the highway, passing
the condos. Then, I’m not, and I’m here looking north
up to this bright light, wondering if it’s the north star.
The red is bleeding onto the white bedsheets,
which I believe do not belong to me, but I think of
as “mine,” and it takes me a moment to remember the red
is coming from my body, and it is called blood.
I remember blood dripping from my fingers
when I sliced my hand on the sawgrass
on my fourth-grade field trip to the swamp.
I remember red rubble, not organized, real rubble
that wasn’t meant to do anything but be cleared
away like snowbirds in March.
Was the red rubble metallic? It tasted like iron,
or, on second thought, that could’ve been the blood.
That was surely the blood.
It’s hard to say what’s real or not. When I would doze
off in class, I would sometimes hear or see things
that couldn’t be there. An almost-dream.
I don’t think the blood was an almost-dream or the red
barreling towards me while I was still driving. For a moment,
I wondered if I was going the wrong way.
Or if the wrong way was the decision
to wake up this morning, or that morning,
or the wrong way was sleeping away classes,
or the wrong way was the way my hands moved
when the sawgrass cut me, or the wrong way
was towards the villages, or the wrong way
was when I turned my head to look at the condos.
When I turned back, the red, metallic, Mongolian horde
of my almost-dream was barrelling towards me.
Riding too fast to take any note.
I used to think my almost-dreams stopped when I was awake.
Here I am, again, almost-dreaming. The star
north of me grows dimmer and dimmer, and I think
this must be what those condos feel like in the summer.
This must be what the village felt like when it heard the horde
coming. This must be like what the sawgrass feels
when someone runs against it the right way,
and it doesn’t have to make them bleed.
I think my almost-dream
is almost over because someone
has turned out my light.
I feel a pull north, and I think
it’s someone waking me up. Not the directional
north but the north of my childhood
that has hung forever above me
and is reaching for me now.
The almost dream leaves me with the faux
sounds of horses barrelling and blood
dripping and metal armour breaking and
teachers yelling and wind breezing through sawgrass
And a beeping sound getting slower
slower
Slower…
Search For The Styx
The sun sets like a sigh of relief.
They creep like warm molasses from their hollow homes,
Quiet if they could hear,
Dark if they could see.
Feeling what’s left of their dried, greying bodies,
Carry them to the rivers.
Each night, they dance these steps as old as time,
Maybe even older than that.
All their mind tells them to perform is this cycle of seeking
Trying to set their souls afloat in the water
Whose run will release them from reality
Like the rush of steam on a winter’s morning.
Each day, the hunt grows invisible numbers,
As the drip of consciousness sinks into the ground.
Blind to the truths of why they search
Or why their feet do not touch the ground.
Some barely remember what it is to walk,
Others haven’t realized the grave they rest in bears their name.
The sun shoves itself out of bed, singing
Quiet hymns of mourning and casting
Orange hues to signal their return home
To their world of in-between.
Too comfortable to be called purgatory,
Too lonely to be called peace.
Beneath the Oxford Willows
I sit beneath a lounging willow, the dazed sun
teasing coy from an Earl Grey sky, lighting shadows
through leaves, dripping like a lace veil,
painting the damp ground in solace, in peace,
holding my hand steady in its stems.
It was not long here before I saw how
the trees hold themselves differently, prouder,
pushing their chests to a besieged sky,
allowing the wind to grace their leaves,
the river to run in their shade.
The city has taken their cue, an act
of stretching spires reaching fingertips,
gargoyles haunting the streets in faux malice.
All stoic, all prideful, all aware of the town’s sanctity;
its swirling pool of aspiration,
rolling over the rooftops like a spring shower.
A girl runs through the shelter, feeling the leaves
kiss her pink cheeks, her stumbling legs.
Her mother watches on from a bench,
drinking in the moment’s sun,
holding her chin to the sky
Moss Hangs and Hangs
It grows on chartered ground
Near where chartered ships come to port,
With men shrinking from the green widow’s veil
Hanging her brown head heavy.
The branches remember the nooses,
Running to the ground like vines.
The Snap, The Fall, The Struggle,
The moss kissing the bastard’s crown.
The bugs crawl onto white hands.
Curious with greed, they pull and shriek.
Shake out the green to the ground.
Stomp and Punish, Stomp and Punish.
The scalped history hangs in red
Splashed on tired leaves, begging for burial
In the near ground. The trunk grows in time,
They never reach the salvation promised.
The white winter’s yet to cease,
The evergreen moss grows in its grip
Its nose upturned and righteous,
Ready, Ready, to fall like a net.
It watches ships cast out, cargo hold full
Of green beauties stained red in claws.
It sighs and sighs at the shrinking waves,
Hunching its shoulders without a sound.
Northern Georgia
Atlanta summer sticks to my skin.
With the window’s glare lighting my eyes
I doze and doze and doze
Somewhere in Northern Georgia.
Likely there was a yellow Goliath
Carrying us by our pigtails,
Roaring down a concrete path
To a wood-chipped slide.
I don’t remember any of that, though.
It’s seated just behind my head
In memory. I cannot turn to see,
But I feel it staring at me.
A murky blue lake,
A pond and a sea.
Besieged with grimy paws,
And the taste of stale cardboard.
Floating with my toes in the cool mud
Collecting rows of polished worms
Laughing about the prospect of snakes
Only imaginary if I couldn’t see them.
Perhaps the Goliath behind pushed me forward,
Or the worms pulled me down as I pulled them up,
Or maybe an invisible voice I can only know whispered,
“This will be funny.”
The water banished out the air.
The mud suffocated David’s pride.
And the definite snakes cackled below,
Lurching me back to the world.
I looked at the tall ones,
Their eyes show anger strangling worry,
And then at the ones my height,
Awe-struck and anxious.
The burning snakes of shame
Scorched down my neck,
And I cried enough tears
To fill the ocean anew.
The Galway Review 