Laynie Browne: California Poets Part 10, Five Poems

Laynie Browne

April 2nd, 2026

California Poets: Part X

Laynie Browne

Five Poems

Snakes around her, wrapping

What's touching your skin. A man in sequins. Pants. A woman in layered metallic. Want. A tall cloche hat. Felted moons. Satin effect. Angles. The relation of dressing to consumption. A capsule vocabulary. Changing a name. What isn't about movement and light? Remarking or remaking a library of words to wear. When we are layering what are we guarding? Why does cloth make her weak when faced with sheathing a day?

Her red and white all over black and blue

I wore a severed saffron song, a little witch lost in voluminous pithy dark. She's in another book, breathing. A stitch closes its skies. Electric between the unspoken paintings—were women. They stroked themselves into position, then hung or tilted against. When making is the obvious recourse. Refusing a world of paste and rags. Your weight is a refuge. Pulled tight with sash windows. Opens the doors whose hand told. In the blight.

under a high hat

I wore your sanctimonious scarf, relics of having a neck. To drape with pears, undulations of hands. Rhyming centipedes, or however many had crawled between eyes. No matter the diameter. Hungry for vetiver. A chalice of nails. Lightning once illuminated a non-existent path, a slightly pried window. To leap. A planchette. I hid behind a slab of soapstone in a grotto of fermented hours.

tries on a scandal

Dressed in plummy vats of straw, the ground curves, a necklace of fried eggs, cards and deftly-lobed loamy words.

And she is ink

A travelling dress. Guise, guile, or disguise. I woke up and put on my get-up. My designs for the day. Long enough for warmth, but not so long as to tangle or trip when walking fast. Up and down stairs to catch a stain. Will the right line assure a safe passage? On this occasion, promptness is key. Make punctures in hidden coat seams. Open and stitch-in a clock. Hands set ahead of arrival. Pearls hem. A movable curtain—just above the surface of luster.

Author Bio:

Laynie Browne's recent books of poetry include: Apprentice to a Breathing Hand (Omnidawn, 2025), Everyone & Her Resemblances (Pamenar, 2024), Intaglio Daughters (Ornithopter 2023), and Translation of the Lilies Back into Lists (Wave Books, 2022). She co-edited the anthology I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (Les Figues Press) and edited the anthology A Forest on Many Stems: Essays on The Poet’s Novel (Nightboat). Honors include a Pew Fellowship, the National Poetry Series Award for The Scented Fox, and the Contemporary Poetry Series Award for Drawing of a Swan Before Memory. She teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.