LaRae Pynas

 What Holds, What Reaches By: LaRae Pynas I come from a yard where the oak outlived three houses and one marriage, its roots threading the dark like a rumor no storm could quite uproot. My mother’s voice is in that soil— soft orders, grocery lists, the scrape of her laughter against a hard day. My father’s silence is there too, heavy as wet clay, teaching me how not to speak and why I should. These are the roots: hands that worked past aching, names spoken over kitchen sinks, photos in shoeboxes that smell of dust and lemon oil, the stubborn, ordinary faith that tomorrow means “try again.” But I have always watched the branches. How they spend themselves on sky, how they risk the fall for one more inch of light. Every book I’ve dog-eared, every ticket stub in my drawer, each late-night sentence I almost deleted— they are twigs, thin but insistent, leaning toward a world that has not yet learned my name. Some days the roots grip my ankles, whisper sta...

  The Door You Closed By: LaRae Pynas I keep the door you closed from fading away. The hallway holds its breath each sleepless night, Your absence is the ghost that bids me stay. I trace the peeling paint, the soft decay, As though my touch could turn regret to light; I keep the door you closed from fading away. I whisper what I never found a way To say before you vanished out of sight; Your absence is the ghost that bids me stay. The others say that time will smooth this gray, That love moves on, that shadows learn to write; I keep the door you closed from fading away. But every step I take to move astray Returns me here, compelled by some old rite; Your absence is the ghost that bids me stay. Perhaps one dawn I’ll finally turn away, Unbolt my heart and walk into the light; I keep the door you closed from fading away, Your absence is the ghost that bids me stay.

  The Blue Room By: LaRae Pynas   When Lena turned the key, the house held its breath. It was an old house, the kind that kept its own weather. In the summer, it baked, in the winter it creaked like a ship in ice, and in all other seasons, it smelled faintly of lemon oil, mothballs, and something sweet she could never quite name. She had spent half her childhood here, sticky knees on wide-planked floors, Saturday cartoons echoing in the sitting room, the rattle of her grandmother’s sewing machine from down the hall. And always, at the end of the upstairs corridor, the closed door. The Blue Room. “Don’t go in there, Len,” Gran would say when she caught me lingering near it, her voice brisk in a way that didn’t match the softness of her hands. “It’s not for you.” “What’s in it?” Seven-year-old Lena had asked more than once. “Storage,” was one answer. “Dust,” was another. Sometimes, on evenings when thunder rolled over the roof like a bowling ball, she would hear so...