All in by Laura Ann Reed

Winter and Silence

SWWIM Every Day
by Laura Ann Reed

by Laura Ann Reed


—after Tomas Tranströmer


Winter’s iron bell

mutes the white tulip and the peony.

The arguments among the jays

no longer scrape the air.

In the glacial nights my regrets

pace the corridors.

And what I’m trying to say

hangs out of reach

like the fruit of a different season.

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Laura Ann Reed is a Contributing Editor with The Montréal Review. Her poems have appeared in seven anthologies, including Poetry of Presence II, as well as in numerous journals. Her most recent work is forthcoming in Illuminations. Her forthcoming chapbook, Homage to Kafka, will be published in July, 2025. See lauraannreed.net.

Outside a Bistro in Marseille, 1968

SWWIM Every Day
by Laura Ann Reed

by Laura Ann Reed


Some wounds never close.
I only mentioned his necktie
in passing, then watched him
whip it off and drape it around
what was nearest to hand, saying
to the lamp post, Monsieur,
your taste is atrocious. Already
glorying in his strangeness
I didn’t know whether to laugh,
remain silent, or run away.
I call back through the years
because so much been lost
to silence. Because the place
no longer survives as what
it was when I loved it. This deep
need for what is gone. I keep seeing
it hanging green against gold
on the lamp post where I can
almost touch it.

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Laura Ann Reed, a San Francisco Bay Area native, taught modern dance and ballet at the University of California, Berkeley before working as Leadership Development Trainer at the San Francisco headquarters of the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the United States, Canada and Britain. She is the author of the chapbook, Shadows Thrown (Sungold Editions, 2023). Laura and her husband live in the Pacific Northwest.