Solace, by Laura Ann Reed

Bowels of the Earth – Water, by Naoko Fukumaru (Canada) 2020

​Solace

Numbed by the world’s troubles
I sit at my computer scrolling through everything 
but the news. Is it prayer, this clicking
and clicking?

All I can say 
is that I don’t quit until something inside 
shifts. Quickens. Tiptoes from shadow 
into light when I stumble into a trove 
of photographs that show how nicks
and fissures in fragile, fractured 
things are fixed—in the ancient tradition 
of Kintsugi--with natural lacquer
dusted with gold.

Somehow consoled, I gaze
at these cups, plates, teapots, shells--
for the moment restored, their frailties
aglow. So like our hearts, those shattered 
bowls, their seams of fleeting brightness.

​Laura Ann Reed

Laura Ann Reed holds a dual undergraduate degree in French/Comparative Literature from The University of California, Berkeley, and subsequently completed master’s degree programs in the Performing Arts and Clinical Psychology—prior to working as a leadership development trainer at the San Francisco headquarters of the United States Environmental Protection Agency. She and her husband currently reside in western Washington. Her work has been anthologized in How To Love the World, and is forthcoming in the SMEOP anthology: HOT, and in the anthology, The Wonder of Small Things. Her poems have appeared in Swimm and The Ekphrastic Review, among other journals.