Lauren Tivey

Lauren Tivey Poems

Lauren Tivey Biography

Lauren Tivey has been living in China for the past two years, where she works as an English Literature teacher in the American Program at a Chinese high school. Lauren received her undergraduate degree in poetry and literature from Granite State College in 2005, and her MFA in poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts, where she was the recipient of the 2008 Jack Myers Grant for Outstanding Poetry. Her poems have appeared in Deuce Coupe, The Montucky Review, The Literary Burlesque, Blue Lake Review, The Legendary, Message in a Bottle, Gutter Eloquence, SPARK, Word Salad, Snakeskin, Sierra Nevada Review, Red River Review, Medicinal Purposes, Timber Creek Review, Sahara, and Red Owl, among other publications, both online and in print over the years. Her chapbook, The Breakdown Atlas, was just released in July of 2011 from Big Table Publishing Co. An avid traveler, she has also written a number of travel stories, which appear on both mightymercury.com and expatwomen.com. She lives for poetry, photography, travel, and adventure. You can visit her poetry blog here: http: //laurentivey.blogspot.com/)

The Best Poem Of Lauren Tivey

Elegy For Japan

Over the tortured shores of Miyagi,
a spinning uranium sky, full of ghosts,

those taken during lovemaking, meals,
while singing their earthly songs,

whispering stories of their gone lives,
of the broken, the taken, the swept-away:

they tell of Owatatsumi, gathering the bodies
to his sunken necropolis, wrapped to sleep

in his ribbons of kelp; of children stolen by waves,
rocked to rest in the embrace of mermaids;

their passions by the sea, goods of their days,
of the polished mandolin, its gentle tune

carried away from long-fingered hands;
of the silk-tailed calligraphy brush, snapped

under the house; of painted, porcelain bowls
and carved chopsticks, separated from mouths.

They tell of the vanished, the interrupted,
of the never-again, and the once-was.

For the orphans with their bottomless eyes,
huddled on tatami mats in freezing shelters,

for the shattered man in the rubble, the frozen dog
in the mud, for Fukushima, Iwate, and Ibaraki,

for the crematoria belching and billowing without end,
for the trembling, twisted landscape, for all the lonely dead,

for the parents and children, husbands and wives,
and everything left unsaid, for you, for you, for you.

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