Juliana Laury
Artist. Mother. Insatiable creative.
My Story
I was born with the soul of an artist. Always looking. Always questioning. Always paying attention.
After giving birth to three boys in three years, I faced an identity shift. As an insatiable creative, I knew that I needed to find my way back to my voice through art, but I was at my lowest point energetically, emotionally, and spiritually. It was during this challenging turning point that poetry came pouring out of me. I wrote it in the dead of night, while rocking a child to sleep. I wrote it in the car, the only place where I could cry alone. I wrote it on walks, after storming out of the house. I wrote it in notebooks, in my phone, in my head. Poetry became the only art form I was capable of creating, and it saved me.
Now, I write it with joy. I write it with abandonment. I write it for myself because I find a wisdom there that, as David Whyte says, I didn’t know I knew.
“Why should things be easy to understand?”
— Thomas Pynchon
Selected Poems
My Childhood Home
I lay on the bed
In the home of my youth
The sounds are the same as they’ve always been
My mother’s voice through the vents
My father’s work in the yard
I know how the light hits every doorknob
Every bedspread
At every time of day
In every season
Of every year
I know which windows don’t have a shade
And which curtains my mother has replaced
I left in search of my own life
I bought my own bedspreads
My own curtains
And returned with arms full of children
And a heart full of gratitude
For when I lay on this bed now
I hear my children’s laughter through the vents
I hear the hum of their toys
I lay in the bed of my youth
With the exhaustion of a mother
Knowing that this is the one place
In the entire world
That I get to be
A child.
The Graveyard
I am drawn
-to a certain type of land-
The way others are drawn
-to the sea, the mountains, the caves-
To Earth
-overgrown and alive-
Where decaying bones can be found
-six feet under, approximately-
And headstones litter the ground
The way my husband feels at home in a land of seaweed and rocky shores
I feel at home surrounded by lives I did not know
Will not know
But visit all the same
The graveyard is My Place
The Home of the dead
The Home of my past
The Home of my future
Gift Guide
What gift says
Thank you for cleaning the shit off the walls
What gift makes up for the sleepless nights
The lines stretched into skin
The hair clogging the drain?
What sale could possibly compensate
for a career put on pause
for those first precious years
before someone else is in charge
Of an entire education
Is there a card on the rack
That speaks to the hope of morning
And desperation of night
A wreath to adorn the door
Of the home that feels both like a prison and a sanctuary
It’s endless loop of days so poetically represented by a string of evergreen
Here, I wrapped this for you
This totem in my hands
Is nothing
is nothing
is nothing
But me trying to say
Thank you