by Diane LeBlanc
1.
Yesterday I passed a field of pumpkins collapsing inward.
Too late for gleaning,
I trespassed for a few seeds of wish you were here.
2.
Did you know
when a power failure cuts the zoo lights
and mutes whirring air and water,
creatures wander from hiding
to tap their beaks and claws on glass
in a code of solidarity?
3.
I’m sorry.
I miscarried the map.
I abandoned the wolf.
I exceeded the weight limit.
I went to the circus
in search of a clown
and came home
with a damaged elephant.
I derived reason after reason
and served each like a tender potato
on the steel fork of my absence.
4.
Please send salt. My memories are bland.
5.
Alone in the woods at night
I hear snapping and scratching.
Mushrooms offer to absorb the noise.
I name them after dead ancestors.
Somewhere in an interstellar corridor
minerals flare and cool.
6.
Forgive my silence. Artificial intelligence is bottom trawling English for the day’s catch,
uprooting endangered remnants of my great, great grandmother’s Portuguese. I teeter at the
wide mouth of the net, on some days water, on some days word.
7.
Today’s poem is a brown trout muscling through my veins.
If all that remains of you in me
catches it, I’ll cut your line, remove the hook,
and release, again, this common, heavy life.
Diane LeBlanc is a writer, teacher, and book artist with roots in Vermont, Wyoming, and Minnesota. She is the author of The Feast Delayed (2021) and four poetry chapbooks. Poems and essays appear in Bellevue Literary Review, Cimarron Review, Mid-American Review, Southern Humanities Review, and Sweet Lit among others. Diane is a professor and writer in residence at St. Olaf College. Read more at www.dianeleblancwriter.com.
Emerge Literary Journal 