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.

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