Flying
I am recounting the dream of our brother
who doesn’t remember dreaming it, nor sharing it
with me in the morning. But you were flying
a kite on the beach in the nimble light of afternoon
& the breeze was just waking. You were alive & perception
was full: our brother, a bird overhead with the aerial
view of your fleshy heart. & the sky, he said,
had just opened as though it were an upside-down piano
that had carried too much sound & needed to jettison
its tunes. & though our brother held the notes
between twig & beak & feather, he could not find
the keys. & you seemed to have not any idea
of this bird swooping down & down & down, nearing
your hands, attempting to tangle the string. Because
the only sound was you, laughing—& the wind
against your face that became the new hand of your incredible
making. & he could almost touch it: your fleshy heart,
that it appeared, he said, was happy.
When My Brother Asks Why, Given Our Similar
Histories, I Did Not End up Like Him—
We must contradict ourselves, I say. Because a man
also said, over & over, through the mouths of many of us:
we contain multitudes—& surely this is the meaning
we are after, each sunrise, as we weigh this against that.
How else to reconcile not wanting to wound anyone,
yet thinking it fine were someone who has hurt me
was wounded still. Now & again, cliché is necessary
& philosophy, ill-advised. Like that time a student, sensing […]
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& Here, Language Is, After All
You wanted me to understand, which means you never
wanted to be understood. A link to I’m so lonesome I could cry
or What it’s like arriving via text message after midnight.
On more than one occasion, you asked me to listen
to Dax Shepard’s podcast because you’re him & he’s you.
To sum it up: you wanted to throw a party for mercy
by speaking in code. I wanted to throw a party for mercy
by creating conditions that would allow you to put language
to the feeling. The way, in winter, the flowers always
find themselves back in the business of god. Or following
a hard rain, the mountain dreams its body back into existence.
Children take note of cloud shapes & trace with a finger
the ribbon that once held the sky’s loose curls. But this
is all too beautiful for you, by which I mean straightforward.
& therein lies the idea: there are as many uses for a shovel […]
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Susan L. Leary is the author of five poetry collections, including More Flowers (Trio House Press, 2026); Dressing the Bear (Trio House Press, 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 has appeared in such places as Indiana Review, Cream City Review, Diode Poetry Journal, Smartish Pace, Harpur Palate, and Verse Daily. She holds an MFA from the University of Miami and lives in Indianapolis, IN. Visit her at www.susanlleary.com.