the bowl set down by the apricot tree
the bowl set down by the apricot tree, and I, back indoors—startled,
the yard darkening. I wasn’t aware it had grown so late: the windows
black, the feral cat invisible under the limbs. the gates to the safe
world closing, I considered my hands, their smell of danger.
what are our duties? what was it that just flew over? it is still here.
remember when we fell asleep unafraid? now the dread of the sun that
each day rising touches us less and less tenderly. a pact not to harden
in the face of. I don’t know if that was a butterfly or only a shadow.
when my mother miscarried four times I was not yet a body. this was
verified time and again. no children run through these rooms.
crossing from one generation to the next, the rosined bow coaxing
notes from violin strings, producing siren sounds.
Laura Ann Reed is the author of the chapbooks Homage to Kafka (Poetry Box, 2025) and Each Abrasion Inside Love (forthcoming from dancing girl press, Fall, 2026) and the manuscript Nelly Sachs Sequence: A Dialogue (forthcoming from The Pasticheur.) Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals, as well as in twelve 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. She lives with her husband, Grant Reed, in the Pacific Northwest. https://lauraannreed.net/