3 poems
YOUTH
When soft was the sun and Neruda was the night
I was twenty-five and keeping the secret—
a forbidden pet I fed from the contents
of my chest, and in that windy closet
it curled, a pulse of glistening fur.
Windy was the weather at twenty-five
when I wanted my skin to taste
the world and never wanted to sleep.
I nursed the secret into unearned joy
when soft was the sun and Neruda was the night,
but the years kept coming, exacting a debt
I’ll never repay. The more time you’re given,
my young husband says, the more you have
to lose. The rich don’t want to pay
taxes, and the middle-aged don’t want to die.
In too deep we must press on, for death never fit
so well as it did at twenty-five when you and I
swam naked at dusk in the reservoir.
MANIFEST DESTINY
poor sparrow lights
and the branch dissolves into ash
light is the sparrow
the path is the branch
dappling light through
the batting of leaves
an afterimage of splash and spark
squeezed across the retina
light through the leaves
dissolves the path, the branch
you’re suddenly up to your knees
in fern then thorn
grasping, squidlike
fastening to any soft flesh that moves
b-grade blue-gray
hand thrusts out of the loam
a crocus on speed
grabs a teen by the ankle
your time will come
when the desert slinks east
and Appalachia is a chapped lip
we will be unmanifested
unsheltered but in dinosaur time
after the trees still standing
in the Smokies after the Thanksgiving
fires have knit up their crowns
in a chlorophyll-soaked shade
oh, the dark oxygen they exhale!
words for wood that burns:
litard, fatwood, kindling, tinder
lapstrake, clinkerbuilt, clapboard, shelter
old English for shield and phalanx
we live and die so fast—
like flies to these rooted sentries
a tree has time to prepare
to burn through its sugar for a blowsy finale
before it is sapped
I hear spiders working
funnel webs in the grass
water drips from an unknown source
the tiniest bird charges the morning with song
jimmy jimmy jimmy
but the real music is the slipknot
of silence between trills
I know what inexorable feels like
the night train’s layered bass and percussion
the engine’s bellowy wheeze
through the round heart’s ta-chunk, ta-chunk
slowly the seas rise
slowly the trees sing
in the earth’s spring I will die
our children in its summer
this is not a poem of hope
but of wonder
at how dying can be
so damned beautiful
TEEN HUNGER
A story by way of introduction,
a story as proof you understand,
a story to connect, to stage a life, to misdirect—
this is none of those: I took what was offered
because finally it was offered. My longing
to be longed for was incorrigible. I didn’t know
what I wanted because I didn’t know—I guess
I wanted the bruises where they wouldn’t show
made by a stranger who was the friend of the boy
on the other side of the bathroom door, the boy
waiting for what? The boy whose idea this was.
Just back from Paris, he’d made friends
with the Englishman and made money for wine
drawing caricatures on the street. So I can see
how the girl I wanted to be said yes,
though being asked is only part
of what I don’t remember. The chain is still on,
and the door won’t open all the way
on one of those nights where everyone
wanted so bad to feel good that meanness
ranged freely. I was there so the artist could fuck
the Englishman; the artist was there so the Englishman
could fuck a stranger; the Englishman was there
for his appetites. A bite mark around my nipple,
purplish fingerprints flourishing at my hipbones—
made me viable, I can tell you that. I want
to tell you more but the girl inside won’t take the chain
off the door. She’s afraid of what you won’t see:
the humor in it all. This cosmopolitan proposition in practice
at a seamy Ramada in Atlanta, the rub-a-dub-dub
three of us in a tub, the sickly light and none of us
drunk enough. Or maybe she’s afraid you’ll see her
crying and mistake it for shame. I don’t think
it was shame, more like despair, the hunger
still there, and nothing about her changed.
Leigh Anne Couch’s work has appeared in magazines, including Salmagundi, Gulf Goast, Smartish Pace, the Cincinnati Review, Subtropics, Copper Nickel, Pleiades, and PANK. Her first book, Houses Fly Away, was published by Zone 3 Press; in spring of 2021 her new collection, winner of the Vassar Miller Prize, will be published by the University of North Texas Press. Couch’s work has been featured in Verse Daily, Dzanc’s Best of the Web, and in The Echoing Green: Poems of Fields, Meadows, and Grasses (Penguin). An editor at Duke University Press and The Sewanee Review for many years, she now lives in Tennessee with the writer Kevin Wilson and their two sons.