Leslie Harrison
Summer 2024 | Poetry
Two Poems
Natural history
& the coyotes scrape the dark away with throat with teeth
& I don’t know how any longer to be awake like that
& rawly wholly belonging
& out in any weather any season
& maybe I never knew maybe that way was always shut
& the green perfect flames on April’s wicks torch the early light
& we deserve to be cast out deserve to be disinherited
& it was never our garden
& the sparrow picks from the cut blades of lawn
& supplements the nest
& makes children born of egg twig detritus
& the softened stalks of the newly severed
& shaped into a cup made to cradle made to shed water
& cup your hands and hold a life any life but your own
& spread the autumn’s seed-head in fertile soil
& gather the tiny newborn maple vivid in broken concrete
& tuck it into dirt tuck it into the future
& leave out your trimmed hair your fabric scraps
& let the small and mighty do what you cannot
& what it turns out you never could
& make a nest a home a new life from nearly nothing
& feed it from your flesh
& fledge it into the wind
Rain
In stores in plazas in the suburbs the states
the bullets rain down blown by hurricanes
of science and fire in the schools the bodies
fall like rain they call it a rain a reign a hail
of bullets they call for thoughts and prayers
they watch the rains watch the news safe
in their houses they shake their heads they take
their time press the flesh press their unsullied
shirts we have a science a study of the rain
a meteorology of falling we know too much
about blood spatter how to identify each drop
how far it flew from the body from the father
the mother wailing like a siren in the distance
we study velocity study direction we photograph
the shadow of a body we outline the shape
in chalk to be washed away by the rain washed
from memory by the next storm already arriving
we see we measure the rain we are so very good
at measuring the dead for their coffins we decorate
the box the child comes in we paint it with the things
she loved we decorate the body with soft fabrics
we brush her fine hair tuck it back with a clasp
we clasp the handles walk the box like an offering
through the church we walk it down the aisle
bride of the rain bride of the gun spent bullet
ejected from this our chamber we set the box
of child here in the school of the dead swimming
away in the rain
Leslie Harrison's third book, Reck, was published in March of 2023 by the University of Akron Press. Her second book, The Book of Endings (Akron 2017) was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her first book, Displacement (Houghton Mifflin 2009) won the Bakeless Prize in poetry from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in New England Review, Kenyon Review, West Branch and elsewhere. She divides her time between Baltimore and the Berkshires.