“Teaching Speech,” a Poem by Laura Kolbe
From the Collection The Decadent Movement
Saying yes to no and yes to yes to
the baby boy so many times a day
it’s like a people’s protest chant gone non-
electric harboring a claim belonged
to everyone who cares, we care, we crawl
outside and spy more life to point and yes
at with a name. What do you call the fence
around a tree? Who is the life you seek
when indexing the noon moon’s matte navel,
gray and nervous, and tell her wait for night?
To mother is a power ever to be
repeating, peat-cut to provide a weight
of burnable goods by eons replaced,
a turf, a moniker, another yes.
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From The Decadent Movement by Laura Kolbe. Copyright © 2026. Available from University of Pittsburgh Press.
Laura Kolbe
Laura Kolbe is a physician, medical ethicist, and writer. Her poems have appeared in the Best American Poetry series and in American Poetry Review, Conjunctions, Harper’s, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Poetry, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. Her first collection, Little Pharma, won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize and was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her chapbook Keeping House: Six Longer Love Poems was selected by Kwame Dawes as the Center for Book Arts annual chapbook contest winner. She teaches and practices medicine in New York City.
