Tag: Laura Ann Reed

The World Self-Admits to Hospice by Laura Ann Reed

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The World Self-Admits to Hospice

I’ll get right to the point, World.
Not like when I visited my dad
in the ICU, pretending it wasn’t the end.
I’ve learned your condition is terminal.
And as my father’s doctor said of him,
a walking time bomb,
the pathogenic processes are multiplying.

Of all your offspring, I know I’ve most
contributed to your undoing.
Most failed to appreciate the sacrifices
you made. The fish worship your rivers
more than I ever did. Daily, the birds
offer up their feathered prayers to your skies.
Even the earthworm invites you
into its sanctum sanctorum, making of itself
a place of praise.

None of your other progeny turns
a deaf ear to your green call, heeding
instead the silvered summons of the mirror.

And if some wonder drug were to restore
you to your former glory, I can’t
honestly claim I’d do things differently
than I did. Yet, I have loved you,
and desperately, in my way.

*

Laura Ann Reed is the author of the chapbook Homage to Kafka (Poetry Box, 2025). Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals, as well as in nine anthologies including Poetry of Presence II (Grayson Books, 2023) and The Wonder of Small Things (Storey Publishing 2023). Reed holds master’s degrees in clinical psychology and performing arts. lauraannreed.net

The Clock Holds Its Heartbeat by Laura Ann Reed

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The Clock Holds Its Heartbeat

              for Grant

Mid-March. Between seasons.
Rain so fine it never reaches the ground.

There is a word for this: Virga.
How did I not know it before?

Trying to remember my virga dream,
I press my cheek to your chest.

Touch rushes in, re-drawing
our boundaries.

During the crisis of pneumonia
I felt such sharp tenderness for common objects.

My favorite blue stoneware mug.
Its chipped rim making it almost mortal.

The hiatus from time was a gift
when the grandfather clock stopped ticking.

The winter hazel is suddenly green.
Just noticing alters my own coloration.

Nights, you go to bed first.
Alone, I sink into the deep meanwhile of my life.

*

Laura Ann Reed is a Contributing Editor with The Montréal Review. She holds master’s degrees in clinical psychology as well as in the performing arts. Her poems have appeared in seven anthologies, including Poetry of Presence II, as well as in numerous journals. Her most recent work is forthcoming in ONE ART, Illuminations, The Ekphrastic Review, SWWIM, and Main Street Rag. Her new chapbook, Homage to Kafka, was published by The Poetry Box (July 2025). https://lauraannreed.net/

Two Poems by Laura Ann Reed

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Father, after all these Years

         — I’m still waiting
for you to fade.
The way dark stars and sorrow
are known to do.
Or like the sky at dusk.
A rhyme from childhood, or a tune.

*

Eight Years Dead

—and never once coming
to me in dreams
begging forgiveness. Self-righteous
in the afterlife as you were in this one, Mother.
Only with the whole sky in yourself
approach me. The whole sky
where there may be air enough
for me to breathe.

*

Laura Ann Reed is a Contributing Editor with The Montréal Review. She holds master’s degrees in clinical psychology as well as in the performing arts. Her poems have appeared in seven anthologies, including Poetry of Presence II, as well as in numerous journals. Her most recent work is forthcoming in ONE ART, Illuminations, The Ekphrastic Review, SWWIM, and Main Street Rag. Her new chapbook, Homage to Kafka, was published by The Poetry Box (July 2025). https://lauraannreed.net/

After the Firestorm by Laura Ann Reed

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After the Firestorm

                Longing, we say, because desire
                is full of endless distances.
                        —Robert Hass

She was away when the flames blossomed
across the hillsides, the inferno fueled
by the eucalyptus and the easterly winds.
But I did not kneel in gratitude on the barren slope
where my mother’s house had been.
          I knelt to sift through the soot and ash,
the heaps of debris.
The image of what I was seeking
so clear behind my eyelids:
the blood-red stone
set in its bezel of gold, a rosebud
on a twining vine—
the ring I’d begged for since I was a child
passed down from my great-aunt Bea
who had smuggled it out of Russia.
          How long had I imagined
my mother was only waiting
for the right moment
to hand me the box,
to watch as I sprung open the lid?
          Yet now, as of their own volition
my fingers stopped raking the dust.
Better to take the blackened spoon,
the half-melted knife.
Tarnished, ruined, my mother’s table utensils
unsuited to the task of lifting food
to the lips, reminders
that what was served up as love
failed to feed any part of my heart’s deep appetite.
          The sun inched closer to the horizon
while I studied the sparrows that were circling
and reversing overhead. I was determined to know
why they wove intricate patterns in the air,
the shadow-glyphs thrown
down around me. Was their manic flight
brought on by the vanished trees
and nests, or by what autumn itself foretells?
          After the last bird swerved and disappeared
into the dusk, the sky was strangely still.
I stayed on unmoved by the absence
of ceiling and walls, scanning
the charred dirt
for signs of what might be stirring
under the surface: the green shoots of a seedling,
a beetle’s six diminutive legs, each bending
at the knee.

*

Laura Ann Reed is a Contributing Editor with The Montréal Review. She holds master’s degrees in clinical psychology as well as in the performing arts. Her poems have appeared in seven anthologies, including Poetry of Presence II, as well as in numerous journals. Her most recent work is forthcoming in ONE ART, Illuminations, The Ekphrastic Review, SWWIM, and Main Street Rag. Her new chapbook, Homage to Kafka, was published by The Poetry Box (July 2025). https://lauraannreed.net/

Two Poems by Laura Ann Reed

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Photograph

His back to the camera
my father stands at the ocean’s edge.
Hands in his pockets, the flannel lining
thin as the hospital-issue robe
his own father wore over his pajamas.
“Go out to the hallway,”
he was told, “if you’re going to cry.”
Today, a moth stirs the air
near the dogwood. Circling and reversing.
Searching for more than is there.
The unopened leaf buds like half-said things.
At what edge does my father now stand?

*

On Suffering

Studying my reflection in the blossoming plums
I stumbled and fell.
My mother, who could never forgive my beauty
leaned over the examination table.
“Now you know how it feels,” she said.
It meaning life, I supposed.
The nurse gave me a tender look, her face radiant
with the world’s pain. A shoulder blade
was eased back into place.
Gravel removed with a surgical blade.
I imagined myself as the rock before it was crushed
and made into pavement. This was consolation.
I sensed all my troubles dropping away.

*

Laura Ann Reed is a Contributing Editor with The Montréal Review. She holds master’s degrees in clinical psychology as well as in the performing arts. Her poems have appeared in seven anthologies, including Poetry of Presence II, as well as in numerous journals. Her most recent work is forthcoming in ONE ART, Illuminations, The Ekphrastic Review, SWWIM, and Main Street Rag. Her forthcoming chapbook, Homage to Kafka, will be published in July 2025. https://lauraannreed.net/

Five Poems by Laura Ann Reed

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April’s Graveyard

My thoughts flee toward the margins.
Chasing after them is one kind of start.
                                    Another is burrowing
deeper into the bewilderment.
As on the day of my grandfather’s funeral.
The girl I was at fourteen in a borrowed
black, tight-fitting skirt who flirted
outside the graveyard gates
with the boy on a bike. Thinking of him
at the graveside.
                                    All these years later
something remains, unformulated.
A speechless undertow
of the loneliness that washes through me.

*

Childhood

In the back garden, diagonals
of late afternoon light. A few yard tools rest
against the fence. My father is cleaning the blade
of a hoe. He is probably whistling.
I think about my father all the time.
In part from a need like the pull to unravel
a recurring dream. In part because he was my father.
But now it is dusk. Under their tent of branches
the doves ask a question again and again.
Their patience is infinite. Below the silvering sky
the light is the color of an old coin.

*

Ladybugs

Not yet full spring. Mistrust among the tulip bulbs.
The girl pedals furiously, nevertheless.
Flight from childhood? A memory.
“Don’t be in such a rush to grow up, dear,” my father said.
We were in the grove of redwoods when I saw them.
Billions of them. Inches thick along the dark limbs.
The startling intimacy of the small bodies
one atop the other.

*

Beauty

                  —”is the subject of art,”
says Agnes Martin.

My mother wanted to be the child.
Wanted her beautiful future.
Wanted her infants who didn’t live.

I wanted to be the child.
Wanted the reddening leaves.
Wanted to burrow under the canopy of branches.

                  *

At opposite ends of a sandbox: two children
engaged in parallel play.

One with a bucket of water.
Building a castle. Filling a moat.

The other digging holes with a shovel.
Hunting for the delicate bones.

*

Early Memory

The doves summon me into the day.
I call back through the half-opened window.
The sunlight, too, is reaching for me
through the bars of the crib. Then my mother is there
in the way that the room is. Lifted and held, I understand
while the foghorns moan on the San Francisco Bay
that my mother needs to believe she is adored.
More than the doves. More than the sunlight.
Good girl that I am, I press my head
against her breast. Now look at the boat
of her dying, rocking softly
on the water.

*

Laura Ann Reed is a Contributing Editor with The Montréal Review. She holds master’s degrees in clinical psychology as well as in the performing arts. Her poems have appeared in seven anthologies, including Poetry of Presence II, as well as in numerous journals. Her most recent work is forthcoming in ONE ART, Illuminations, The Ekphrastic Review, SWWIM, and Main Street Rag. Her forthcoming chapbook, Homage to Kafka, will be published in July 2025. https://lauraannreed.net/

The Returning Or Circling Of Perception by Laura Ann Reed

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The Returning Or Circling Of Perception

“This is still Eden, alright”, I remind myself.
But today seems to call for some recalibration.
Or maybe it’s only me that needs it.
I can hear my father saying, “Just be yourself,
dear.” Making everything better and worse.
He’d hijack this poem if I let him. Instead,
I attend to the sounds foregrounding
the morning: the washing machine whining
into its final spin; my husband crunching
his cereal, impeding my breakfast reading.
A vicious stab in my upper back recalls
the therapist who said, “shoulder-blade pain
can signal the wish to punch the hell
out of something.” This is husband number
two, the Keeper, mind you. Tomorrow,
I’ll be taking my earplugs to the table.

*

Laura Ann Reed is a Contributing Editor with The Montréal Review. She holds master’s degrees in clinical psychology as well as in the performing arts. Her poems have appeared in seven anthologies, including Poetry of Presence II, as well as in numerous journals. Her most recent work is forthcoming in ONE ART, Illuminations, The Ekphrastic Review, SWWIM, and Main Street Rag. Her forthcoming chapbook, Homage to Kafka, will be published in July 2025. https://lauraannreed.net/

Two Poems by Laura Ann Reed

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The Unfolding

— For Emir Alajbegovic̈

With only the ocean
And a mere stretch of continent

To divide us, this brief eyelessness
Of time

The seven roses of your voice
Once more open in the vase

And on the mantelpiece the menorah
No longer candleless.

*

And Now, Your Silence

canted at an angle to the archives of our past.
         Like the wall in old Jerusalem
that leans against an air so dense
         with the white, six-sided particulate
of human woe that one can’t tell
         where the stone begins, where
the salt-stiffened fingers end. And no way
         of knowing which holds
the other up. The seven roses
         bend and darken on their stems.

*

Laura Ann Reed, a San Francisco Bay Area native whose work has been published in the UK, Ireland, Canada and the USA, taught dance at the University of California prior to her role as Leadership Development trainer at the Environmental Protection Agency. Now retired, she lives with her husband in the Pacific Northwest. Her poems have been included in seven anthologies. Shadows Thrown, her debut chapbook, was published in February, 2023. lauraannreed.net

Autumn by Laura Ann Reed

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Autumn

Beyond a window, a stone’s certain surfaces
are dark with shadow, and each of the three
white blossoms on a rhododendron stem
opens to the wind in a different direction.
From between gray clouds light shines
on a crow’s wing as I turn and turn
in October’s yellow weather.

*

Laura Ann Reed, a San Francisco Bay Area native, taught modern dance and ballet at the University of California, Berkeley before working as Leadership Development Trainer at the San Francisco headquarters of the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the United States, Canada and Britain. She is the author of the chapbook, Shadows Thrown, (Sungold Editions, 2023). Laura and her husband live in the Pacific Northwest.

Three Poems by Laura Ann Reed

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If Not For The Ghosts

At first, I think it is a small bird stirring
in the dogwood. But no, it’s only the dead
colors falling through what is alive
and still ripening.
                 If not for what memory
holds it would be enough to love and die
quietly as do the quails under the bay trees.
It’s the ghosts that keep me at my desk
learning how to say that being with him
was the same as entering a field of wind naked.

*

Burning The Lover

I’ve been thinking about the letters
I send to the man in Lourmarin
and how, for years, I hear nothing
from him. His wife must be
burning my words. Most likely
in the fireplace. He would be close
to eighty now. Maybe warming
his bones the way my grandfather did.
Turning his back to the flames.

*

Where Words Can’t Go

An autumn night. Light poured through the café’s
open door. Outside, a waiter moved in shadow
with a tray of expressos. I saw a face in profile
a few tables away. The man turned. Want to go
dancing, he asked. Adding that there was a boîte
close-by. French for nightclub. Also for box.

As in a shape that contains what is invisible.
The story inside what happens.

Only the saxophone player knew what to do
after the power went out. The slow tunes
that danced us through the unlit room.
I can no longer hear that music, though
the small of my back recalls the hand
pressing me to a stranger’s chest.

*

Laura Ann Reed, a San Francisco Bay Area native, taught modern dance and ballet at the University of California, Berkeley before working as Leadership Development Trainer at the San Francisco headquarters of the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the United States, Canada and Britain. She is the author of the chapbook, Shadows Thrown, (Sungold Editions, 2023). Laura and her husband live in the Pacific Northwest.

Four Poems by Laura Ann Reed

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How Triumph

She crawls across grass
to what unfolds golden among the green.
And becomes golden. Becomes silken.
Becomes petal, pistil, stamen. Becomes
the surprise of bitter on the tongue. Silent
but for random exclamations, she owns
the world. A few years later
from the back seat of an old Plymouth
she will cry out, flowers, pointing wildly
to the yellow mustard blooming
in an open field. Not knowing why
the triumph of her naming
is maybe also a kind of exile.

*

The Spell of It

Sometimes I think of the swing suspended
from a high limb and the child,
maybe five, who discovered transformation.
How her legs pumping were a kind of lulling.
Those movements trance-inducing.
The surrender of plummeting
low only to fling herself skyward. The spell of it.
The passage through the warm summer air
opening into a space where she could choose
to be a bird or visit the moon. She sings as if
the sky is listening.

*

Turning it Over

My father’s footprints, the safety
made by those shapes I stepped inside
as he led me to the water’s edge.
The polished bits of California jade
and carnelian placed in my open hand.
Pieces of rock I’ve kept locked away
long since I lost them. How his
dying would become another
stone I’d turn over and
over in my palm.

*

What Remains

That was the summer I lived in a plant-covered
house across the road from the ocean. The house
I remember is painted green and magenta
by the petals and leaves of a bougainvillea.
The vine climbs up to the second story
where I lie on a sagging mattress
reading a Life Magazine. I stare
at photographs of Norma Jean before
she became Marilyn Monroe. The sound
of gulls comes through the open window.
I can hear the surf pounding the stones
grinding down the sand into finer fragments.
I can hear everything changing into
something else.

*

Laura Ann Reed, a San Francisco Bay Area native, taught modern dance and ballet at the University of California, Berkeley before working as a leadership development trainer at the San Francisco headquarters of the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the United States, Canada and Britain. She is the author of the chapbook, Shadows Thrown, (Sungold Editions, 2023). Laura and her husband live in the Pacific Northwest.

Three Poems by Laura Ann Reed

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What She Wanted

She chides her father’s ghost
for his failure
to outlive her mother.
For going along
with her mother’s decision
that what the furnace refused to take of him
would be carried out in a boat
and scattered in the bay under the Golden Gate.
She’d wanted to have a metal vessel filled
with what remained of her father
to empty into the waters near her home.
She knows that to let go of these grievances
would be to lose him. (I only
wanted, she tells him, to hold onto you,
only wished you’d let
me be the one to know you.)

*

Ostinato

Let me go, my father says.
And when his doctor pulls the tubes
he’s a fish flailing on a riverbank.
How strange it is to stand
so close to this.
When wrenched from its world
does a fish know sorrow?
That summer at the lake
I reeled in a bluegill,
a single fin pinned by the hook.
I couldn’t bear the beauty,
the staring eye. Its belly cool
against my palm I lifted
out the barb, felt the heart’s alarm.
Then I watched the disturbance
on the water’s surface
disappear. Absence holds the music
of a lake lapping at the shore—
a low note that goes on and on.

*

Fear

Older now, what she fears
is the gate swinging open
in a distant field grown nearer.
It’s not her own footsteps
across the stones and windblown grass
that fill her with dread, but those
of the man who positions
his chair next to hers on the porch
to look at the moon.
She can’t say what frightens her more—
the thought of seeing him approach
the weathered boards,
or the vision of herself alone
under an uncertain sky.

*

Laura Ann Reed, a San Francisco Bay Area native, taught modern dance and ballet at the University of California, Berkeley before working as a leadership development trainer at the San Francisco headquarters of the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the United States, Canada and Britain. She is the author of the chapbook, Shadows Thrown, (Sungold Editions, 2023). Laura and her husband live in the Pacific Northwest.

In the Darkened Pane by Laura Ann Reed

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In the Darkened Pane

From my house I watch evening sift down
through the blackberry, winter-bare.
My father isn’t anywhere
I can touch, or brush dust and leaves
from the letters of a name
I once wanted to lose, wanting
to lose my history. I tried to step away
from the long disgrace—
ghosts and shadows handed
down. I was the only one of seven
pushed into the light who refused to die.
Night is now claiming
the juniper’s blue-green needles.
A woman’s face is unreadable
in the darkened pane. Harp strings
plucked by the wind’s fingers.

*

Laura Ann Reed, a San Francisco Bay Area native, taught modern dance and ballet at the University of California, Berkeley before working as a leadership development trainer at the San Francisco headquarters of the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the United States, Canada and Britain. She is the author of the chapbook, Shadows Thrown, (Sungold Editions, 2023). Laura and her husband live in the Pacific Northwest.

Child Fears, 1956 by Laura Ann Reed

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Child Fears, 1956
                       —After Jim Harrison

Jellyfish. Egg whites. False teeth.
Undertows. Mean kids. Bomb drills.
The neighbors’ dog that bit off my kitten’s head.
Old T.V. newsreels of Nazis. Polio.
My aunt with the goiter and bulging eyes.
Snakes on the fire trail. Bobcats in the canyon.
Bees in the grass. Cat poop in the sandbox.
Walk-in closets. Rip tides. The circus.
My grandfather’s open coffin.
The flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz.
Mussorgsky’s The Night on Bald Mountain.
Pictures of missing children on milk cartons.
The shadow of my hand on the wall.
Falling into the hole they dug for my grandfather.

*

Laura Ann Reed, a San Francisco Bay Area native, taught modern dance and ballet at the University of California, Berkeley before working as leadership development trainer at the San Francisco headquarters of the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the United States, Canada and Britain. She is the author of the chapbook, Shadows Thrown, (Sungold Editions, 2023). Laura and her husband live in the Pacific Northwest.

On Any Given Day by Laura Ann Reed

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On Any Given Day

despite all else, delight can swoop
down unannounced. Like these black-capped
chickadees—their bright, staccato calls
insisting on existence. The pizzicato
footfalls ferrying their feathered frames
to a geography of sprinkler-fed rivulets.
A terrain of diminutive lakes.
The way they splash, preen, toil—
plucking worms, beetles, seeds
from the saturated soil.
Despite all else, the beauty
of that greed. The marvel
of those beating hearts.

*

Laura Ann Reed taught modern dance and ballet at the University of California, Berkeley prior to working in the capacity of leadership development trainer at the San Francisco headquarters of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Her work has been widely anthologized and published in literary journals. Her chapbook, Shadows Thrown, is scheduled for publication on February 26, 2023 by Sungold Editions. A San Francisco Bay Area native, Laura resides with her husband in western Washington.

Two Poems by Laura Ann Reed

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Something Useful

She finds me sprawled
face-down on a chaise lounge—
head in the shade, legs in
the sun. I peer between
white vinyl slats at
a tiny black ant.

You could be doing
something useful, she says, my
mother whose mouth holds
rivers that swim with
consonants and vowels—
so many ways of saying,
You’re not the daughter I wanted.

How to explain—
what’s sacred resides in
the sensation of warmth on
the backs of my legs, that and
the way the ant carries what looks
like a crumb in its jaws, although
I can tell it’s really a city of stillness.
Also, the fact that no one but
I witness it crossing the patio tiles,
bound for a place it belongs.

*

Thief

Early spring, I slip through
           a gap in the privet hedge.

The neighbor’s apple tree quivers
           with white frills of silk, unfurling

leaves that spin in wind. My mother
           won’t hold me in her gaze the way

I stand here gaping at this
           ancient tree. Won’t rock me

like I’m cradled in rain-
           soaked winter limbs, sheltered

in July—when the thinnest
           membrane lies between bark

and my sun-dark skin. In fall, that
           profusion of small, hard fruit. Tart,

with only a faint trace of sweetness.
           I eat and eat this proof of love.

*

Laura Ann Reed’s work has been anthologized in How To Love the World, and is forthcoming in the SMEOP anthology: HOT, as well as having appeared in Loch Raven, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Swimm, The Ekphrastic Review, and Willawaw, among other journals. Laura holds a dual undergraduate degree in French/Comp Lit from UC Berkeley, and completed Master’s Degree programs in the Performing Arts, Clinical Psychology, and Organizational Development prior to working as Leadership Development Trainer at the San Francisco headquarters of the United States Environmental Protection Agency, prior to the Trump Administration. She and her husband now reside in western Washington.

Only Now by Laura Ann Reed

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Only Now
           —after Jim Moore

But I’m not ready, my father says,
           to be taken off the playing field—

and first I bring him shells that hold
           the sea. Then river stones. Then I

bring his favorite recordings
           of Paul Robeson singing spirituals

and lullabies. These make him cry.
           And it’s only now, two decades

later, that I see my error: All he needed
           was for me to be with him. To step

closer to his bedside. To allow into my heart
           what flooded his—all that loneliness.

*

Laura Ann Reed holds a dual undergraduate degree in French/Comparative Literature from The University of California, Berkeley, and subsequently completed master’s degree programs in the Performing Arts and Clinical Psychology—prior to working as a leadership development trainer at the San Francisco headquarters of the United States Environmental Protection Agency. She and her husband currently reside in western Washington. Her work has been anthologized in How To Love the World, and is forthcoming in the SMEOP anthology: HOT, and in the anthology, The Wonder of Small Things. Her poems have appeared in Swimm and The Ekphrastic Review, among other journals.