&

Leslie Harrison

 

Once I was nowhere and to nowhere I shall go & I don’t even know what “I” is beyond the suit that grew and now diminishes along the long bones the way we emerge like slow daffodils furled tight then straightening into sun and rain then curling into cold into gone & what we have what I have is the street-lit circles wet pavement glittering orange & the low sky its untranslatable rain humming against the evening’s slick windows & each world exists for the duration of a life a whole universe spools & unspools in June’s brief arrivals the fox leaves prints in roadside mud the deer leave thick parentheticals they fill with rain then mud dust air broken flecks of leaf and petal until none of them fox deer human small sparrow are legible are written on the earth written into the code we’re all another gesture flicker another mystery in a world made mostly of mystery and small pools of joy

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Leslie Harrison’s third book, Reck (University of Akron Press), came out in spring 2023. Her second book, The Book of Endings (University of Akron Press, 2017), was a finalist for the National Book Award. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in New England Review, Kenyon Review, Copper Nickel, and elsewhere. She divides her time between Baltimore and the Berkshires.