for Peter

Welcome, he says, to The Grand, the only admission fee
Your postcards: leave them in the bin by the coffee urn.
 
His hand is a fistful of places we’ve been or endured.
He thinks our sorrows are lovely in the grateful, winter-
sunrise light. Maybe the dust in the air is evidence
of the confluence of implosion and resurrection or just

sand blown in from the beach. That’s a tension between

the personal: griefs peculiar to each of us: a curb-side
morning when a good drunk finally went bad, losing
a baby the day the Towers fell—such a small loss on
such a public day—maybe a son to a motorcycle accident,

no war in sight, just black ice, and the public: like New

York City, the day after: everything that doesn’t die rises.
We wait at tables, searching each other’s faces, playing
with our tools: forks balanced on forks, the same trick
practiced by all visitors to winter. He gives us pens, gold,

azure, cerulean, crimson, tells us to write the morning

you first remembered you knew how to live. We laugh
the kind of laugh that means we want to think it’s
silly, but know it’s exactly right. Tomorrow, the plan
for Ground Zero will be chosen: metal balanced on

metal, a latticework as fine as Japanese bakers amazing

the world with a cherry-blossom tree of bread, from a
country based on rice, and light balanced on the need
to remember, light layered against the night, blown up
from the footprint as far as physics and grace will allow,

the particles of dust proof of what we’ve all survived.

Laura McCullough is on the faculty of the English Department at Brookdale Community College in New Jersey where she is the Chair of the Visiting Writers and Lecturer Series. She holds an MFA from Goddard College in Vermont and has won a New Jersey State Arts Council Fellowship for her writing. Her recent  work has appeared or is forthcoming in  The Paterson Literary Review, Faultline, Exquisite Corpse, In Posse, Slant Review, Whimperbang, Slow Trains, NYC Big City Lights, and Pierian Springs Review.