Laura Kolbe’s “You”

The LARB Quarterly no. 44, “Pressure,” presents a new poem by Laura Kolbe.

By Laura KolbeApril 17, 2025

• LARB Lit

• Poetry

This poem is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 44: Pressure. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

¤

You

Clench, cramp, implode, spring, relax, make two from one: I see you cells
pinch yourselves raw on a dim filmstrip adhered to my mind, making the thing

in the middle school screen, like one Christmas light torn off a strand, or a corner
of Bubble Wrap clung to a shipped jar, you rage under the microscope’s light,

you puff and suck, the paroxysm of another doubling, but still pushed up
against yourself, somehow you know to be cliquey and gummy, another cresting

corner of you already beginning the next swell. Inside me you rail on in secret, eyeless 
     ambush,
you let out the hem of another armada and soon you will learn to drink

down blood. Six weeks in forty. Want and fear, oldest orifices, grip me, chafe me, tongue
at my time-share, dissolve the document to salivary pulp, all the bylaws that ringed me,

the riders I rode. This motor thrashing fingerbreadth beneath the hull, its movements
not mine, these paces, rates, chyron-crawls, and inner increments, these inclines,

beckonings, siphons, indentures, a world of increase without my mind’s direction,
my rapping baton, my wish to keep you but slow you, steer you, pause you on a skate-toe’s

rubber brake, lay you on ice and look at you a while, cool you in a jeweler’s velvet drawer,
write a few lines today, keep the key for you in an old wool coat, find you later

with a twenty-dollar bill, take you out my marble cache, my mammon, grow you out
some more like schoolgirl bangs, make the built world halt, be I, be paddling down

an empty pond in an empty body, alone. I was pumice once, I floated and scratched,
I slew towns with the juices of the planet’s mantle, I was practically male, I brittled

when the magma cooled and left limbs where they slept. Will you let me gallop lava again
on Naples and Martinique, will you turn a proto-eye-place to my prowls, predations,

my mercury harebrains, my mouth, my me, my taking my time, my take, my taking?
Will you wait until I bid you forth? I who never ask before seizing. You who know nothing

of juddering between delay, delicious, and bone and meat that say what shambles say,
that time is the knife and gneiss and not the ice chest. Will you keep you. You who know

nothing yet.

¤

Featured image: Theo van Doesburg. Composition XI (Kompositie XI), 1918. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (54.1360). CC0, guggenheim.org. Accessed April 11, 2025. Image has been cropped.