Laura Kolbe

Contributor at Virginia Quarterly Review

Articles

The Yale Review | Laura Kolbe: “Knowledge”

3 weeks ago | yalereview.org | Laura Kolbe

Laura Kolbe Windbreak of dark hair on the ear-tops of my baby. Faint spade of dark down, shining between shoulder blades. Little second grin of scarce mustache: a boy disguised as his future. And hard to believe from my fair and ham-cheeked line. I used to tutor a girl who looked like my son does now: teem of charcoal curls and one terrific browkissing itself above the nose. Third grade, skinny, comfortable, wearing her casual bodylike a dish towel flung over a drying line.
A Poem by Laura Kolbe: ‘Hinge’

3 weeks ago | theatlantic.com | Laura Kolbe

The door rattles. Blast of pain, and past the pear-white chill of the birth ward bustlesthis odd shadow down my legs and away. Wet hair styled stiff by the minute’s ladle—you are here and growing to the naked eye new dizzy space in your lungs. Rigging the topsailnailsbreadth at a time. Your nails clear and tiny, row of ellipses erased.
Still | Laura Kolbe

1 month ago | nybooks.com | Laura Kolbe

Tell me about the final day my body—full as it’ll go without yet changingsize or shape, denser than it ever packed itself, the last day of Body-Before—will still not show, when mirror still won’t mark how underfleshhas no reserve, no extra give or compress left, the airless torso sedimented ona pelvic leaded glass, tell me which will be the last time I look at me whileold body’s custardy silt still anchors to the barque of how I am. Say a month. Say tomorrow. Say not now. Was it just now?
“Pregnancy on Street-Cleaning Day”

Oct 27, 2024 | newyorker.com | Laura Kolbe

When I thought myself most honestI was merely movingaside from the relevant surfaceand not getting downto the nature of things. Me in my rattletrapbaring the black roadso the sweeper truck touchesits gray skirts there and departswith ratty nibbled leaf. Then I would roll my vehicle backto the lip of stone fringed abovewhat’s happening in the street. Little changed. I mean to announce the coming of a child.
Two Poems | Issue 48 | n+1 | Laura Kolbe

Aug 22, 2024 | nplusonemag.com | Laura Kolbe

Giangiacomo Rossetti, NYC Purple. 2024, monotype on Rives BFK paper. 11 ½ x 8 ½". Photo by Zeshan Ahmed. Courtesy of the artist and Greene Naftali, New York. Three and a DogWe clack the mini farmer back in the barn. The roof hinges on sleeping sheep. For dinner viscosities now there’s three: One for eight teeth, one for fifty-six (Two adults, their wisdoms gone), One for old canines, wet and cigarette Tan at the base, that chew what they might And not what they can.
Month to Month | Laura Kolbe

Jan 18, 2024 | nybooks.com | Laura Kolbe

So-called feminine hygiene products are self-effacing by design. Imperceptibility—the “no feel protection” advertised by Always pads, the “made to go unnoticed” tagline of Tampax—is the gold standard, or at least the chimerical promise, of the various absorbent or fluid-capturing products put in or near vaginas on days when effluent from the uterus is expected. Devices that aspire to nonexistence can still, however, be big business.
Winter 2023

Jan 10, 2024 | vqronline.org | Paul Reyes |Andrew Zubiri |Garret Keizer |Laura Kolbe

Winter 2023 In this issue, reporter Harriet Brown and photographer Lynn Johnson offer a deep dive into the impact of medicinal cannabis on children who suffer from severe illness. Faced with little to no options, in an often-hostile legal landscape, parents have turned to cannabis oil as a way to accelerate their children’s healing or offset the potent side effects of intense pharmacological regimens—often at great legal risk.
Land Lines

Jan 9, 2024 | vqronline.org | Laura Kolbe

Nature is a club of which we are all members. Its nonexclusivity is appalling: How much more would we savor our belonging if a spot on the roster had to be earned, flanked by references, or conferred by birth? Instead, there is absolutely no one to lord it over, unless we count our moment’s trendy and belabored fascination with the uncanniness of computer intelligence.
Laura Kolbe: "The Scarecrow"

Sep 19, 2023 | yalereview.org | Laura Kolbe

It will all end, this particular theater of perpetuum self unbidden by any mastering hand. I loved the straw tickingthat filled my chest. I loved the old hogshair adorning my scalpand the feeling in dirt of my own stakes. Being free has been its own poem in a gilt-edged book, a fieldshining at its edges around a blurred and glad scotoma. The corn burns. Gases fix themselves to white hairsdeeper than the workers can see. They trust the undertaking. The appetites of soil.
Tiny Fissures

Sep 10, 2023 | vqronline.org | Laura Kolbe

My first act of writing, after having a baby in early January of this year, was a February journal entry. I do not keep journals—my essays and poems mark time for me. But sometimes we are hurled toward what we normally don’t do.