{"id":3694,"date":"2022-06-03T12:41:23","date_gmt":"2022-06-03T19:41:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/?p=3694"},"modified":"2024-12-09T09:34:15","modified_gmt":"2024-12-09T17:34:15","slug":"three-poems-by-laura-read","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/three-poems-by-laura-read\/","title":{"rendered":"Three Poems by Laura Read"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"issue70\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Found in\u00a0Willow Springs 70<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back to Author Profile<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

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Three Poems by Laura Read<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

Bureau<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

 \nWhen my husband asks me where I put the keys,
\nI say they’re on my bureau,\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

and he says you mean dresser<\/em> <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

and I say no, bureau.<\/em> <\/em>\nYour mother must have brought that with her
\nfrom New York, he says,\nand I say, yes, she carried it with its three top drawers
\nfor her silk panties and slips,\nher stockings, the small sachets she always used
\nto scent them, embroidered like my grandmother’s\nhandkerchiefs, my grandmother who came once
\na year to see my mother and her bureau,\nwho poached her egg in the early mornings
\non the kitchen stove. I didn’t know poach,<\/em>\ndidn’t know pocketbook,<\/em> the black bag
\nshe opened at the metal, magnetic clasp\nand drew out a gold tube of lipstick,
\na romance novel with a picture of a man\nwith his hand on a woman’s breast
\nlike the print of the Rembrandt hanging\nover our mantel
\nbut that man looked like he had asked\npermission, like he knew
\nhe only had this small circle of light\nand he should touch the fabric of her dress first
\nbefore feeling for what was under it,\nthe skin that had been sleeping
\nfor years beneath a girl’s nightgown,\nlike the ones I kept folded in my bureau,
\nand the one I took\nfrom my grandmother’s apartment in Queens
\nafter she died. It was still in its plastic–\nshe must have ordered it from a catalog
\nwhen she could no longer go down\ninto the city but had to look out at it
\nfrom a great height so she was closer\nto the telephone wires her voice traveled to my mother
\nlike a thin road, winding and black, the kind\nyou drive at night, the moon always with you.
\nWhen she was gone, I unwrapped her nightgown.\nIt was pink and cotton and sleeveless.
\nI wore it standing on our porch\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

so I could feel the wind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When You Have Lived a Long Time in One Place<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

 \nthings start to vanish. Like the old Newberry’s
\nwhere I used to buy earrings that looked
\nlike tacks, six pairs for a dollar, and then
\ngo sit at the lunch counter with the old people
\neating patty melts and drinking black coffee.
\nThey stared in front of them like the women
\non the bus with their plastic rain scarves
\nthat they took from their purses when the bus
\nlurched toward their stop. They wore dresses
\nfrom the old country. Now I wonder
\nif they have nowhere to go. The building
\nstands empty like a mind that still clicks open
\nits eyelids in the morning but can’t remember
\nthe words that stick things to their places,
pants, chair, toast.<\/em> How can we remember
\nif they keep taking things down, like the house
\nwhere I lived when I was young and waiting
\nfor love? I lay there in the yard in my bathing suit
\npink as a poppy and I could feel his shadow
\nwhen it touched my body. That body
\nis gone now too, hanging in the back of a closet.
\nNow there is only a clean slate of grass
\nwhere that house stood, the same grass
\nthat covers the spot in Lincoln Park
\nwhere there used to be a wading pool,
\nwhere I took Ben until the day I turned away
\nto get a toy for him and then he was
\nface down in a foot of water and I pulled him out
\nand we looked at each other and I could see
\nin his eyes that he couldn’t believe the water
\nwas heartless, that it didn’t know who he was.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

People Don’t Die of It Anymore<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

 \nWe’re driving up Carnahan, winding south
\ntoward the Palouse, its fields of wheat\nat our periphery like hair.
\nThis is the road where Robert Yates dumped\nthe bodies on his way home
\nto his five children, hearing the door\nclick open in their dreams
\nso later they’ll say they knew.\nMy dad says the retirement home
\nwe just passed, brick and lit with the cold\nsunlight, used to be a sanitarium
\nfor women with tuberculosis\nand my sons ask, What’s tuberculosis?<\/em>
\nWe ‘re on our way back\nfrom Greenbluff, constellation of farms
\nto the north where you go in the fall\nfor pumpkins and apples
\nand I can feel their beauty\nin the trunk of the car, the thick fruit
\nbeneath the ambrosia’s skins, the seeds\nwe’ll have to scrape out of the pumpkins
\nwith a metal spoon and the strings\nthat will get under our fingernails
\nand hurt for days. St. Therese\nof the Little Flower died of it.
\nShe was so kind in her biography,\nalways opening the door
\nfor the gardener. And then she started\ncoughing blood and I mourned her
\nin my plaid uniform\nand my Peter Pan collar.
People don’t die of it anymore,<\/em> I say,\nand we fall quiet for a moment and stare
\nat the houses on Carnahan,\ntheir fences and dark windows,
\ntheir scribbles of smoke.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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