#laura read

[deadbandsong]

Maybe my favorite young Laura moment. Me too, kid. Girly stuff is hard.

Uncanny X-Men. Claremont/Davis. 2005.

[violettesiren]

The air conditioner is dripping down the peeling paint, and the bathroom is full of poisoned bees staring at themselves in the mirror before they die, and all I want to do is drive, the radio a river of summers, everything I’ve lost flashing in its current. The car is blowing cool air over my skin and my arms are bare and freckled and they still look like my young arms, the ones I stared at in the sunlight on the front steps of my first house, thinking These are mine. No years in the skin, the years my friend from college keeps talking about when I meet her for breakfast. She orders eggs and then apologizes because she remembers how much I don’t like them, even though it’s been twenty years since she left her pink coat in the front closet and then called from Red Deer to ask me to send it. It was too soon, we needed more time to slide under. But I went to the closet and took the coat off the hanger. It had fake fur and little suede triangles, and I folded it and packed it in a box. My friend sips her coffee. Even back then she could let a pause fall like a shaft of light. But when I poured too much rum in my coke night after night, she poured some of it back, and through the thin walls of our house I sometimes heard her crying. She doesn’t finish her eggs and they sit between us on the table. Soon we will have to go back outside, into July.

July by Laura Read

[deadbandsong]

I’ve killed in your home country. You’ve killed in your home country. This is how this friendship thing works, right?

New X-Men. Kyle/Yost. 2006.

[deadbandsong]

Currently reading and musing on Laura Kinney from 2003 - today.

Highlights:

NYX

Uncanny X-Men

X-Men

X-23

New X-Men

X-Force

Cable

New Mutants

Avengers Academy

Avengers Arena

All-New X-Men

Wolverines

All-New Wolverine

X-Men: Red

Age of X-Man

Fallen Angels

X-Terminators

[deadbandsong]

I want an entire book that’s just mental pictures of what Laura thinks of people.

Marvel Team-Up. Kirkman. 2005.

[ukdamo]

Love Poem with Staples

Laura Read

After the nurse has taken all the staples out of Brad’s new scar, he asks me how many there were, and I regret not counting. This is the seventh surgery since his accident fifteen years ago, the hardest except for the first because the doctor had to rebreak the bone and start over.

We can rebuild him, we have the technology is something Brad likes to say because before all this, he was a boy in the 1970s who watched The Six Million Dollar Man. The morning of the accident, our sons were at swim lessons. I was watching Matthew’s round head as he did his bobs, the water slicking his hair to his face so he looked like he was being born. I never saw him like that since I’d had c-sections and my own staples. One of my last memories of Brad’s brother happened at Staples. They were leaving to drive across the country, and we were saying goodbye, and it was late and dark, but they were still going to try to make it to Montana, and of course before they left, they needed to print something at the last minute because for them time was always something you could make more of. We said goodbye under the red sign that said Staples, and this stapled itself to the moment so now when I drive by Staples, I think of Terry bending down to hug me for one of the last times before he died. Brad walked into this room on the same crutches he’s been using since the original accident. The handles are wrapped in blue tape, and parts of the grey cushions are flecking off. They are the Velveteen Rabbit of crutches. There are many ways to be broken, and Brad is all of them. After she was dead too, I read in my mother-in-law’s journal how grateful she was for me so Brad would not be alone. I thought how prescient because now it’s just me here with him, and the nurse who is funny and kind and fills up the room and makes us feel like things will be all right but is also almost done with the staples and on her way out.

[highonlife1497]

Come check out my film adaption of Laura Read’s poem “When You Have Lived a Long Time in One Place”.

[lunchboxpoems]

THIS TIME WE'LL GO TO KENTUCKY FRIED CHICKEN

You were the one with the body that could balance on a skateboard, dive into a pool, the water closing behind you. And you could hold your breath at the bottom, watch the sunlight shatter on the tile. Your eye marked where to send a ball and it would hit the backboard, the mitt— you could chart a trajectory from the boy in the doorframe who stood next to me and looked at our mother not getting out of bed after our father died, his bed made, all the stripes pulled up vertical under the pillow where his head would never leave another dent. You said, If she dies too, we’ll go to Kentucky Fried Chicken not Wendy’s where we went after the funeral which you spent driving your matchbox cars up and down the lines of wood in the pews, steering the small wheels around the knots underneath the soft polish. You tried to be quiet, but I could hear you making your car noises in your throat.

LAURA READ