laura R. mccullough

Laura R. McCullough is an artist and writer happily nestled with her family in the North Georgia mountains. A “lover of faith and believer in what is beautiful,” she and her husband minister through their testimony of healing to help bring light to others. Laura uses her writing and mark-making to explore how deep wounds can make room for the deepest roots. Her work has been published in journals such as Rattle Magazine, The Blue Mountain Review, and Right Angle, and her artwork is featured in several regional museums and galleries. Some of her work and thoughts can be found at speakyoursouldesign.com and Instagram @speakyoursoulpage.

Much of Laura's writing is an examination of faith in the places we lose it, or struggle to steward it. The featured piece, “Hope is Like a Bird,” looks at her experience within a family displaced by war, their beliefs shelved in the aftermath.

Hope is Like a Bird

or Two Stones

I.

At the death of distance,

we found them together.

Elbows touching

at the kitchen 

table cleaned 

last for my father and first

for this missing 

person; their artifact a trail

of little black and white 

squares.

In albums we found them

hiding from life

with the people in them,

gray icons of a world

sure it had always existed.

I knew better.

This history that would 

betray the gaps 

by filling them

was cast with characters from

someone else’s story.

How could my life be 

shaped so 

by a woman

hiding in plain sight?

Shreds of what I could touch,

pattern paper and unfinished 

curtain hems;

the outline of a person

somehow enough to set

my moorings,

yet not able to bear

any weight.

In some battles the only

survivor is the fear

of everything.

This woman who 

was a mountain,

crossed lines and stitches,

wires and oceans,

who could never

bring herself to teach 

me anything that  

might hurt.

Could never bring up

the hurting already there.

She was a whole continent to me.

Afternoons and decades 

given to places 

no one has ever really been.

Bargains made with God

come up lost in the winning.

The smell of her on the couch, 

to a child, was never

the smell of an unwashed body,

or of spark and wit

turned 

to a spiraling self-neglect.

Spiraling like endless 

apple peels

skinned for pies that said

I love you

when no one knew the words.

It was never the smell of

isolation.

It was just

her.

II.

All the beauty in the world

lived in her mother; fading 

here in gelatin and silver.

The after made her angry,

hard in the buried places

and settled with bitterness.

The warmth and wonder

held in smooth hands,

the longing in her voice

when she spoke

of anywhere but here;

all calendar pages and

clipped wings.

With Saints and

mortars blurred in the

thunder, no one 

can play in the rain.

Hope fossilized 

in linoleum

is too brittle an anchor 

for much footing

this side of the Wall.

The stories she chose

for me to know her,

scattered coins,

never enough together

to buy a meal.

So much less her

than the smell of the couch.

Fear of wasting

and wanting

steeped into the spine of the house,

pressing your weak points

so that you would be strong,

more than they were,

better.

For all the birds

we could not eat, and

the bones that wouldn’t scrape clean,

she gave me only and all

the parts of herself that could 

stand the sunlight.

But I don’t think we ever

wanted to be better;

only to be 

whole.

Read more of Laura’s work in Solum Journal Volume IV and Volume VI: Doubt (forthcoming).