Laura Foley – String Poet

When the doctor says
I have permanent
hearing loss in both ears,

I imagine a monarch,
wide wings propped
on fragile legs,
resting on the wise doctor’s
balding head.

I shiver in their
thin green gown,
completely fit, except
this constant ringing
I’ve heard for years,

a side effect, I thought,
of silent retreats,
a hyper-attunement attained
through much hard work,

a sensitivity to the movement
of my body’s cells,
my inner cricket’s
tic, tic, tic.

When he adds:
It will get worse—
the butterfly lifts
on able wings
from it’s slippery perch,
unimpeded by dangling legs.

Laura Foley is the author of three poetry collections. The Glass Tree won the Silver Foreword Book of the Year Award, and was a Finalist for the New Hampshire Writer’s Project, Outstanding Book of Poetry. It received Honorable Mention in the Sheila Motton Poetry Book Award, New England Poetry Club. Her manuscript, Night Ringing, was a Finalist for the Autumn House Poetry Prize. Her poem Driving Route 95 was a Finalist in the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize, 2014. Her poems have appeared in journals and magazines including Valparaiso Poetry Review, Inquiring Mind, Pulse Magazine, Poetry Nook, Lavender Review, and in the anthology, In the Arms of Words: Poems for Disaster Relief. She won Harpur Palate’s Milton Kessler Memorial Poetry Award, the Grand Prize for the Atlanta Review’s International Poetry Contest, a poetry fellowship from the Frost Place, and Columbia University’s Bunner Prize for her work on Wallace Stevens.