Laura E. Lucht

Laura E. Lucht grew up in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California and currently resides near Seattle, Washington, where she is an M.F.A. candidate in Creative Writing at Seattle Pacific University. She holds an M.A. International Studies from the University of Washington and a B.A. in Russian & Soviet Studies and Linguistics from UC San Diego. In her free time, she goes for walks in the woods and chases rabbits out of her tiny garden.

tending leyla

The bedpan and the high-heeled shoe

commiserate on the worn parquet.

Eight beds fill this ward, sixteen living souls:

the wounded and those who tend them.

Smell the greasy chicken soup, iodine and sweat.

Shuffle wooden chairs for nightly vigils.

The surgeon drones through teatime rounds.

A grizzled woman snoozes in her body cast.

Her niece knits socks from crimson wool.

Last night, while Leyla slept, the woman

in the next bed retched as orderlies

shouted and threaded a tube down her throat.

I watched the Angel of Death

pace the courtyard beneath

our second-story window.

Baku, Azerbaijan

Read Laura’s work and more in Solum Journal Volume IV.