There are borders toward which 
she moves, although she can’t say 
what galaxies they lie between. 

Daily, she prepares for a parting 
in the trees, waits for the window 
hinge to break, the pane to crack 

and fall. She’s ready for the wind 
to fill her room. She has one foot 
planted on another planet, 

and in her sleep she yields naked 
to the Eros of its magnetic field—
its ethereal embrace. When she wakes 

she lifts the shade, impatient for a glimpse 
of flight: a sparrow, a swallowtail— 
something with wings she can memorize. 

Laura Reed

holds a BA in French/Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley and completed Master’s Degree Programs in the Performing Arts, and Psychology. She was a dancer in the San Francisco Bay Area prior to assuming the role of Leadership Development Trainer at the San Francisco headquarters of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. She and her husband now reside in western Washington. Her work has been anthologized in How To Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope, and has appeared in Blue Unicorn, Grey Sparrow, The Ekphrastic Review, Third Wednesday, Willawaw, and other journals.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ How We Get the Final Word, a poem by Laura Reed in Verse-Virtual (February 2022)

⚡ The Aging Poet Talks Back to Her Parents, micro-poem in Shot Glass Journal (Issue 36, January 2022)

⚡ Moth Wings, poem in Third Wednesday (18 October 2021)