A mother spends the evening rearranging
the siblings in their beds. Each child is a misbehaved
angel, each limb demanding the attention of a heart
by skirting the human hand. It takes an honest bystander
to draw back the leaves & account for the knot
inside the sister & the name inside the brother. The knot,
which grows deep among her eye sockets, heavy
with rain. The name, which burrows into the dried
earth of the sister’s stomach, an ephemeral fire
of winter that disrobes the trees of their sorrows & offers
last season’s nest. So much to be seen—& we hope
to be seen in sleep more than we hope we may
never die. Such little time for redundancy. & because
there are two mouths, the children never run out
of things to say, even while tumbling & tumbling against
the mother’s hands, the sounds of their togetherness
caught inside a paper bag. The mouth, a hand; a hand,
a mouth; the mouth covering a hand. Why resolve
this tension? Even in spring, the flowers were so crestfallen
& hibernating. Even in spring & asked what happened,
the children never named what they saw.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 26, Issue 2.
Susan L. Leary is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Dressing the Bear (Trio House Press, July 2024), selected by Kimberly Blaeser to win the 2023 Louise Bogan Award, and the chapbook, A Buffet Table Fit for Queens (Small Harbor Publishing, 2023), winner of the Washburn Prize. Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in such places as Indiana Review, Diode Poetry Journal, Crab Creek Review, The Arkansas International, South Dakota Review, Tahoma Literary Review, and Verse Daily. She holds an MFA from the University of Miami and teaches at Indiana University.
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