Anna Leahy
Summer 2024 | Poetry
Warble in Late-Year
When you swallow today’s news, a truth
Cracks, sharp in your own mouth.
How many otherwises divide the time
And bodies and bodies of water, the now and now
And where the stones came from. How do stones find
Skulls as if they were pockets? So many stones and pockets.
The border between elsewheres has been drowning
A long time. Nothing rouses the sternum
Quite like a rhythm. Anyone thrums
With blade-throat. The sky gets under the skin, breaks
Bottles atop the perimeter wall. The place in the news
Spits glass. A swallow is
A stone thrown, a flock of stones.
The mouth turns gravel into wailing.
Anna Leahy’s books include the poetry collections Gloss, What Happened Was:, Aperture, and If in Some Cataclysm (forthcoming in 2024) and the nonfiction book Tumor. Her work has won top awards from Mississippi Review, Los Angeles Review, Ninth Letter, and Dogwood and appears at Aeon, Atlanta Review, The Atlantic, Bennington Review, BuzzFeed, Poetry, Scientific American, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. She edits Tab Journal and has been a fellow at MacDowell and the American Library in Paris. More at https://amleahy.com.