Category: Laura Read

July

Vandal Poem of the Day: November 3, 2016

by Laura Read
The air conditioner is dripping
down the peeling paint, and the bathroom
is full of poisoned bees staring at themselves
in the mirror before they die,
and all I want to do is drive, the radio a river
of summers, everything I’ve lost
flashing in its current.
The car is blowing cool air over my skin
and my arms are bare and freckled
and they still look like my young arms,
the ones I stared at in the sunlight
on the front steps of my first house,
thinking These are mine.
No years in the skin, the years
my friend from college keeps talking about
when I meet her for breakfast.
She orders eggs and then apologizes
because she remembers how much
I don’t like them, even though
it’s been twenty years since she left
her pink coat in the front closet
and then called from Red Deer to ask me
to send it. It was too soon, we needed
more time to slide under. But I went
to the closet and took the coat off the hanger.
It had fake fur and little suede triangles,
and I folded it and packed it in a box.
My friend sips her coffee. Even back then
she could let a pause fall like a shaft
of light. But when I poured too much
rum in my coke night after night,
she poured some of it back, and through
the thin walls of our house I sometimes
heard her crying. She doesn’t finish
her eggs and they sit between us
on the table. Soon we will have to go
back outside, into July.
from Dresses from the Old Country (2018)Find other Laura Read books in the library
Copyright © BOA Editions, Ltd 2018
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc.
on behalf of BOA Editions LTD.

Intro to Poetry

Vandal Poem of the Day: November 1, 2016

by Laura Read
Professor Nordhaus assigned me
Galway Kinnell’s “The Hen Flower,” section 2
of The Book of Nightmares, instead of section 3,
“The Shoes of Wandering.”
Who wouldn’t rather go with Galway
to The Salvation Army to try on “these shoes strangers
have died from”? But instead, I got the hens,
unable to understand the ax or the eggs,
and me, not getting why it was the hen
who helped Galway know
how little he knew, how we sleep on the feathers
of hens, how these feathers are all that lie
between us and darkness.
How hard it must have been to write
“Listen, Kinnell,” and then to stop writing and listen
to the hens in their sawdust beds.
How hard it was to read and then go back
to my room in Grace’s house where she let me stay
for free while I went to school
so I could learn again and again that everything
dies, even the poem, even Galway
who died this week and brought me back
to that classroom where I sat behind
a dark-haired girl named Mona.
She only spoke once in class, the day we discussed
a poem called “Breasts.” I learned then that she wasn’t
shy, she just didn’t care much for shoes
or hens, but breasts she liked, she kept almost
cupping her own under her sweater as she talked
about the poem until I thought she was going
to actually show them. Which is where I think
the poem was going.
from Dresses from the Old Country (2018)Find other Laura Read books in the library
Copyright © BOA Editions, Ltd 2018
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc.
on behalf of BOA Editions LTD.

Vaccination

Vandal Poem of the Day: October 31, 2016

by Laura Read

The scar on my arm is thin like the skin

of a fruit close to splitting.

It marks my birth as before ’72,

before the end of smallpox but after polio,

after the wheelchairs and the iron lungs,

the radios crackling with war.

If you were born then, you remember

taking your Halloween candy

to the fire station to have it checked

for razor blades. You were a gypsy

because that was still okay.

Maybe there was one black girl

in your class like Martha Washington

who brought upside-down clown cones

for her birthday and then moved away.

You watched the Challenger blow up

on the news again and again.

I was there in my boots and eyeliner,

waiting by the wall until a boy

asked me to dance. His mouth was a shock

of salt. I flicked my name off like ash

from my cigarette. I loved how the tip

flamed, like the squares of coal

in our furnace. Maybe you remember

my father. He was thin and transparent

like the place where the needle went through.

Maybe I can peel it off, the dead skin

from a burn, the kind we got back then,

before sunscreen, when we just took off

our clothes and got in.

from Dresses from the Old Country (2018)Find other Laura Read books in the library