Leslie Adams

Leslie is a first-year MFA candidate at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and a 2008 graduate of Mississippi State University, where she earned her MA in English. While attending Mississippi State, she served as a poetry editor for The Jabberwock Review and was awarded both the Eugene Butler and the Albert Camus Creative Writing Scholarships. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Cimarron Review, The Southern Poetry Anthology Volume II: Mississippi, and New South.

Fracture

I’ve seen already how I could hate your thin mouth,

the ragged teeth of the story a glass shard, a memory scar—

I have not yet learned to let time bear weight like a healed bone.

And the narrative is never linear,

the convoluted edges of other and self, that radius of wanting—

how expendable we become, how superfluous to each other’s lives,

with our simple human dependence on signs and omens

balanced like birds legging single stalks of grass in the hayfield,

wreathing the supernatural like a ring around the moon,

something we can approach but never address,

something we wait for, not the light but a diffusion of the light—

how we look with indulgence on ourselves, our simple human wants and weaknesses,

your shoulders worn to the thin blades of a child’s

that I would cover as if they are shameful,

if I could wedge my hands to that omen of bone

without breaking them, if I knew I could have them back.

 ~originally appear in the Cimarron Review

Wanting the Earth

“You will want the earth, then more of the earth—

it will feed you, it will ravish you, it will not keep you alive”

                                                          Louise Glück “The Sensual World”

So this is why imagination, like love, thrives on absence:

the light here won’t let us think;

we are ruined by accuracy.

the sea calls back its waves like a falconer,

each morning wakes into place on cue,

heat runs like the hot slap of sap down the ruined trunks of trees,

and the sky, unchanging as an eye, posing water,

drags horizon like the train of a wedding dress;

so studied, everything, so choreographed,

breaking down into other, compressing and reassembling,

sand clamoring back to shale and granite, formless and reforming—

so this is mortality, this is what the word means:

touch and the loss of touch, sight and the failure of sight,

the rain scattering pizzicato, the burden of the stilled string—

If the Child’s Face is a Small House

When we look again the sun will be gone,

although it will doubtlessly circle back to stand behind us,

discarding shadows at our feet. 

And the child who stands behind us, who makes us seem taller,

will also circle back to stand twelve years behind us,

and will call forward words that we are unable to hear at this distance,

waving frantically in greeting or warning,

and will not be lost in the coming dusk.,

and will not be silenced. 

But your face braces itself like the early lines of a house that will not shelter.

I have lived under your jaw for too long

not to recognize the grinding teeth like the sharpening edge of a knife.

I have seen your jaw set like a sun.

I have done this now for many nights, at your feet like a child.

Unlike me, the child is wise, and not easily fooled or caught.

I do not yet know if the child’s face is also a small house,

or whether I would be invited in.

Why should we question this?

The dead are aligned exactly as we left them,

and the unborn still whisk just over our heads like birds

for whom I half-cast the net and draw it back empty of even air.

Come here, little one.

I will not refuse you your questions,

and will not cast nets or accusations.

I dreamed each one of your teeth like unearthed seeds, but here, see,

they have been in my hands all the while.