POETRY
By Theresa Leo
P.S.
The end is not near. We’ve passed the end, and it’s so far back
it’s like the tit of a cow in a field of poppies, a dot in a field
of many dots in a painting a myopic man is straining to see
in a village museum near a city we’ve never been to
nor will. It’s so far back I can’t remember the exact
moment of it, the way I didn’t see the curve ball coming,
the one that clipped my left hip as I swung the bat,
missing and not being missed. It’s the part of the eraser
worn down to the black metal band, the one that left
hideous gashes in the page of the test the math teacher
sprung on us, so many equations without solutions,
numbers that divided like soldiers on a reconnaissance mission,
then divided again. It’s in the back of the closet in the box
of Thank You cards I put stamps on and never sent.
It’s that last conversation, the staccato of conjunctions
that kept each noun at bay, the one that wound down
to the luxury of nonspecifics—the possibility of or,
the horror of but, the delusion of and. It passed me by,
the way beauty, like disease, has been known to skip a generation.
Song of Woo with a Hole in It
When you leave,
take the embalmed summer squash
you sent through the mail
as a sign of affection,
the apricot pit
you sucked to the bone
then thrust in my mouth
during the first kiss
of our first night of bedpost
and fruit and nylon seduction;
take the choice Adorno quotes
you used to explain
the half-hearted handholding
at the river in that New England city
where you snuffed out
every possible chance
for me to say it out loud;
take the poolhall serenade
and see-and-raise metaphors,
the mouth and neck allusions,
the overtold stories
of wrists and teeth.
Despite the Elizabethans,
I do not love you
or your adjectives;
so take all those bandaged moments,
the ruined voice, the dark space
between tooth and lip I’ll miss.
Teresa Leo is the author of the poetry collection The Halo Rule (Elixir
Press, 2008), winner of the Elixir Press Editor's Prize. Her work has
appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, New
Orleans Review, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Painted Bride Quarterly,
Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. She has received grants from the Pew
Fellowships in the Arts, the Leeway Foundation, and the Pennsylvania
Council on the Arts. She works at the University of Pennsylvania.