Erin is sitting on the floor
of our dorm room.
Erin with the thick red braid
and the freckles the sun had tossed
across her face. Erin who is pretty (More …)
Laura Read
Laura Read’s chapbook, The Chewbacca on Hollywood Boulevard Reminds Me of You, was the 2010 winner of the Floating Bridge Chapbook Award, and her collection, Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral, was the 2011 winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and was published in 2012 by University of Pittsburgh Press. Her second collection, Dresses from the Old Country, will be published by BOA Editions in fall 2018. She teaches English at Spokane Falls Community College and currently serves as the poet laureate of Spokane.
“In the same way we misunderstand the child ballerinas of Degas”
by Laura Read
“In every alley of the theatre loom the silhouettes of portly gentlemen in top hats who have come to take their pleasure with these skinny half-naked adolescents. They too will have learned to mime desire.”
–Germaine Greer
But what if they have come instead to make pleasure
by force? Sometimes the body flushes
when it shouldn’t. Someone says,
I am going to teach you something.(More …)
The Whole History of Femininity
by Laura Read
At your wedding, you lifted up your dress
so I could attach your garter belt to your stockings.
My hand was shaking even though we still had
the strange intimacy of girls,
so you had to reach around and clip the belt yourself.
I failed you and the whole history of femininity.
But we lived in a time of elastic. (More …)