By John Leonard
Whatever season it is, you feel haunted by it,
torn to pieces by a hand shaped scar that disturbs the dust
on your bedroom window. And now, the wet boot prints
of your father, detached from body, slowly limping down
the narrow concrete stairs of the cellar. Threats break out
of every locked room and into every meditation.
You could write the initials of your middle school crush
across your forehead with the ashes from your fireplace.
You could peel an orange and weave a dreamcatcher
from its bone-white pith. You could make them all go away.
But what you do when the light dries, or the glass stops flowing-
nobody alive concerns themselves with it. Only the dead
claw through the mud to be reminded of you. You aren’t free.
You watch the evening kill itself again and again. Your beauty
lies in this witnessing. Your worth is what you carry for them,
what you won’t let go.
What’s the protocol for desecrating an already ruined scene?
You have a right to my grief, is the wrong response to I love you.
And your hindsight is a flat tire, a baseball bat to the temple
of your recovery. You conjured these memories into being,
amassed a horde of relics that have evolved into vessels.
You gave life to the shadows darkening the ceiling above you.
John T. Leonard is an award-winning writer, educator, and managing editor of 42 Miles Press and The Glacier. He holds an M.A. in English from Indiana University. John’s poems have been published in Chiron Review, December Magazine, North Dakota Review, Ethel Zine, Louisiana Literature, Jelly Bucket, Painted Bride Quarterly, Tipton Poetry Journal, Qu Literary Magazine, Hole in The Head Review, Nimrod International Journal, The Indianapolis Review, Two Hawks Quarterly, and The Emerson Review, and many others. John was the 2016 inaugural recipient of the Wolfson Poetry Award, the 2018 recipient of the Josephine K. Piercy Memorial Award, and the 2019 recipient of the David E. Albright Memorial Award and Hatfield Merit Award. He lives in Elkhart, Indiana with his wife, son, cat, and dog.
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losing our grip on purpose 