Laura Mattingly
Laura Mattingly is a second generation Lithuanian American, and a third generation Irish American, who grew up eating burritos, listening to Mariachi music and Radiohead in southern CA, floated down the Missouri and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans on a homemade raft and now studies mental health counseling at Loyola University (because she's just crazy enough for the job). She studied writing at University of California, Santa Cruz, and University of New Orleans. She has poems in Big Bridge New Orleans, New Laurel Review, and Maple Leaf Rag. Her "Book of Incorporation" was published by Language Foundry in 2012.
Lucy, how could you know, in your tender immediacy, that your great-great-grand-daughter of the future would be a seven-foot-tall dragon with functionless wings?
A healer leans over a sleeping dragon
lays on hands large and webbed as frog’s paws,
arms turn into oily black eels.
We are tired of buildings.