What claw and talon beast of wonder
hunts in the hills of my heart now?
A star for a face, lion-maned,
hawk-tailed, a runner's feet and
archer's bow--a body expansive
as billows blown between suns.

Rough wind, weather me down!
Long-fingered hands, be water! Waves,
carve a gully through my rock shoulders,    
sandstone belly, make me cavernous and
cathedral-grand, hollow-holy.

The long pant of noon. Twilight
star-tremolo. Join them, far-spread
hands coming together, and that
is the sky I've swallowed. 

I am heavy, transparent, light-borne,
wind-drifted. A lashed raft of desires        
and memories of places to call home.        
Bunches of perfect peach-halves,
sweet summer hemispheres, 
curled about a hard, tooth-cracking
hope for a warm-dirt banked, 
fresh-rooted, ivy-trellised spring.

 

 

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LeighAnna Schesser is the author of Heartland (Anchor & Plume Press, 2016.) Her poems are forthcoming in Virga and have appeared in Peacock Journal, Whale Road Review, Mothers Always Write, Ekphrastic, Rose Red Review, Kindred, Synaesthesia Magazine, Verse-Virtual, and Transcendence Magazine. LeighAnna earned her M.F.A. at North Carolina State University. She lives in Kansas with her family and blogs at leighannaschesser.wordpress.com.