I still throw salt over my shoulder because it makes the devil thirsty.
He drinks from an oaken bucket. We can live our lives without him.
*
I know an old tree in Pennsylvania. A girl nobody saw leaned against its moss every day after class.
She wrote in a journal while ants crawled between her silent fingers.
The summer I turned eighteen, she tried to hang herself from it--
the tree, not the journal.
It’s easy to get confused since our words often feel like gallows.
*
You never forget the first time you taste sour milk; that feeling of time's betrayal.
But some things still have to be taken on faith and not on expiration dates.
*
Today, I spotted that girl at a book- store in Duluth, Minnesota.
There is something beautiful about rotting wood.
Divide the Days
A grain of sand…or whatever grabs your attention. August started with a gunshot, and bled into my grand- father’s birthday.
On this day in history, I stopped sending a Guatemalan child twenty dollars every month, because it was cutting into my beer fund.
* The Son of Sam found Jesus. I’m still looking for my keys.
Divide the days between cloud watching and watering a peace-lily that will almost certainly die.
In my father’s house there were many rooms, but only one gun cabinet.
Another piece of glass enters my foot from a ballerina figurine that was broken seven years ago.
My whole point being-- there’s always a little something left behind.
Joseph knew the same people I did. That’s why he fell across the seminary gates and crawled through thorn bushes. That’s why he swam trough all those brackish rivers.
It doesn’t have to make sense to feel it; blood rising in an hour glass while my arms erase the moon. Nobody is God enough for you!
Beseech me or leave a note on the fridge. Either way, I need to be reminded to buy milk and gather a handful of tomorrows. .
John Leonard is a professor of composition and assistant editor of Twyckenham Notes, a poetry journal based out of South Bend, Indiana. His previous works have appeared in Poetry Quarterly, Sheila-Na-Gig, Fearsome Critters: A Millennial Arts Journal, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and Burningword Literary Journal.
