Laura Ann Reed

Better the Hazards

than the cloth of causality, a fabric
of pattern fixed and forgiveless.

Lord, increase my bewilderment.

To wear the loose weave of the rain,
the gray gauze that frays and unravels,
is to turn away

from magnet, compass, scale,
the North Star’s benediction.

Is to recall the face Picasso painted:
the calculus of line and plane,
one eye staring ahead,
the other, the discrepant direction.

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Laura Ann Reed is a San Francisco Bay Area native now living in the Pacific Northwest. She received her bachelor’s degree in French and Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, and she hold master’s degrees in the Performing Arts and in Clinical Psychology. Her poems have appeared in seven anthologies as well as in numerous journals, including Grey Sparrow, ONE ART, SWWIM, The Ekphrastic Review, The Galway Review (Ireland), Seventh Quarry (Wales), wildness (England), and Interpret (Scotland). Shadows Thrown, her debut chapbook, was published in February 2023. https://lauraannreed.net/

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