Sometimes I wonder whether tomatoes feel the slice of my blade,
whether carrots feel ignored as they languish in the fridge.
I plan a pot roast to make them feel useful, then wonder
whether they fear the slow […]

CHECK UP OR CHECK OUT

Friday is library day for Ray who picked Friday because it kinda rhymes with library and other days don’t so much and becoming well-read and new worldly is high up on the list in Ray’s […]

The oranges are all shaved. Rind showing—not undressed or peeled open, mind you, just
stripped for garnish. This is another way of saying you threw a cocktail party—which is another
way of saying you got you […]

SPRING CHILL

With the spring day
coursing cool

in the shade,
I turn a street corner

and, struck by sun,
feel

a recollection
start to formulate, not

as an image, or even
as an […]

I call him Fenimore
To remember his species.

Each morning
I walk to the mailbox
And look to see him,
Cased against the cold
In his feather cocoon of wings and trapped air.
He seems less a hawk than
An […]

Feeding

The redpolls arrived like Christmas cards
scattered beneath our backyard feeder,
little red seals atop their heads
like wax on parchment.
What might be the medieval message
they brought to the […]

Poetry and publishing: two topics that seem diametrically opposed, if you look at them under the perspective that’s the norm in the USA—that of business, capitalism, popular culture. Shake off that norm, how […]

I have removed my shirt and am kneeling in a pit
looking up at a man pointing a rifle down at me.
Quiet, everything is eerily quiet now, the morning’s
hissed commands and scrape of shovels long gone.
Why w […]

After I die,
prop the bones
of a beautiful bird
in my mouth.

Call a medicine woman
back from my home star.
Offer tobacco, cedar, sage, sweet grass,
the seven silent petitions of passage.

For all these […]

From Isamu Noguchi to Man Ray, Poston War Relocation Center, May 30, 1942
Here, in the internment camp
in the Arizona desert
our preoccupations have shrunk
to a minimum—
the intense dry heat,
afternoon d […]

Red Road
 
From asphalt to gravel, from
              Gravel to that barely—what
                        I am searching for I do not
                                    […]

Paris Nocturne
 
The Eiffel Tower rounds its beacon—platinum to black—platinum
to black—waltzes the dark across the room. Upstairs, the couple is fighting

loud and rough. A bottle shatters against a wall. […]

Playing War with My Daughter
 
I stare at my half of the deck
thinking how this game is pure

luck, then of how luck is more than
itself, how it grows exponentially.

At this moment
much is on the […]

Beauty in the Grey
 
I was born without a shadow.
Deftly estranged,
The way moisture collects
In the soot sky.
Relief is temporary
But the stark song of the crow
Shows beauty in the grey.
I saw your […]

One of Sharon Leiter’s myriad of roles and activities while living and working in the Charlottesville, VA community of scholars, teachers and writers was to serve as Poetry Editor of Streetlight Magazine from 2 […]

Autumn 2003

Beautiful, downtown Kents Store, Virginia boasts two businesses, a store with snacks and sodas where hunters register the deer they’ve just shot, and a funeral home (not for the deer). Across the r […]

Partial Obstruction
 
Four Frenchmen
in a Fiat fractured
the front of a frieze
facing Florence Cathedral.

Stupid consonant clusters
crowding each other, bragging like teens
and gawking like tourists […]

The Interloper
 
Night is an interrogative. The owl’s questions
float in the glen where shadows voiced
by the articulate moon stilt their own ground,
measure the trees for graves. The back
of the in […]

When my children were learning to talk, I developed a fascination with language acquisition. The process of learning to communicate with other human beings in the lingua franca of the culture (speaking US English […]