A Room for Future Recognition
In the term paper I wrote in graduate school,
I named every blackbird Ophelia, who named the water
after her unborn, who named every tragedy
a sonnet. In the margin, a claim I’d never succeed
in the field unless I learned to play follow
the leader. I hear you. I hear you—& yet, in the unusable
heart of rebuttal, only I know what I sound like
& anger sounds a lot like weeping because the door
is a door & not a window this time. The dying animal
looking to be lost becomes the dead swan
asleep in its feathered body. The dying animal
looking to be lost defies the reason of imagination
& is confused by the unusual gathering
of a crowd, clapping at sunset. Like those before us,
we fail to distinguish the exit from the entrance,
so we float closer & closer to the bank, the brain
asked to replace the wind, the grief-stricken
turning their backs to the water & stuffing their mouths
with chrysanthemums. Until there is no speculation.
Until every other feathered thing moves
to the opposite side of the lake, a muted song carrying
into the endless countryside of evening. In every
world not yet recognized as a world, there is a table,
a lamplight & a stool—a painter filing down teeth
& accentuating the eyes, a new name carved into the quiet
estuary of a man-made box. Any woman, enter stage
right: the last task, to sew the mouth shut.
A Brothered Thing
I take my brother’s hand
& make him hold
my pencil, ignore
the trembling to survive
the hour, exaggerate
the meticulousness
of his wisdom
to wreck the channel
into healing. Think
of nature as you attend
to language, I tell him.
Think of the heat
that loafs in the summer
& those who loaf
in the heat. Think only
of what makes sense,
that three-syllable
love affair with daffodils
& the brightening
leaves that shed. But
girl, you are a brothered
thing, says the boy
sitting neither in my lap
nor growing from
my palm. Think
of the poem in winter,
because the trees: wouldn’t
they need their clothes?
Susan L. Leary is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Dressing the Bear (Trio House Press, July 2024), selected by Kimberly Blaeser to win the 2023 Louise Bogan Award, and the chapbook, A Buffet Table Fit for Queens (Small Harbor Publishing, 2023), winner of the Washburn Prize. Her poetry, nonfiction, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in such places as Indiana Review, Crab Creek Review, The Arkansas International, Superstition Review, South Dakota Review, Tahoma Literary Review, New Orleans Review, and Verse Daily. She holds an MFA from the University of Miami and teaches at Indiana University.