Sample Poems by Leslie Anne Mcilroy
15 Minutes of French Kissing
for Don Bertschman
are the lips of god praying for what’s
right—deep-velvet dark on the tongue
divine—we see it in broad daylight
if we dare open our eyes. But we don’t,
so masked in our pressing we are
shut inside one another like fire
in a metal box. Burning, burning
and burning more, so all we know
is the wicked, wild flame of desire
and lick it till our mouths are open
explosions. You take off your belt
and the world is melting. I let myself slide
to the floor in a hot heap and midnight
is craning its scorched neck around
our transformation. This 15 minutes
tells the weather months from now
when we walk only in skin, the sky still
so blistered with roiling lover clouds,
we banish ice and lap up the pool.
To be liquid like this,15 minutes deep,
is to be crucified. My hands open—
pinned and wanting—and yours,
pulling the nails out, still have 3 minutes
left—3 minutes of pure, wet faith.
Visit from the Candy Girl
First, I gave her my black clothes and journals
stuffed in a bag, stained red inside with wine—
the picnic I carried in case I got hungry.
Then I gave her the piece of my heart you cut out
that afternoon after movies and cocktails,
gimlets with cherries and orange peels. Silly,
she said and pressed it to her lips like something
meringue, tucked it in her bra and did a dance—
a heel turned toward heaven, a palm full of mint,
a smile like a ginger snap cracking.
And before I could ask for it back—sorrow/twitching wrist—
she lifted her pink gum skirt and ran, leaving me
in the shine, sticky and bare, white sweet and light,
the taste of butterscotch right here—see—on my tongue.
Dismember
It’s not the blood, it’s the separation, the part
of a whole left to crawl across the floor
looking for its body. It’s the foot
used as a doorstop, the arm holding up
a lampshade, the head in bed with the small man
who strokes its fine hair and whispers
love notes in its shriveling ear. It’s the storing
of limbs in the freezer, the old woman
rocking, humming and chewing a hand.
It’s the cries of men—no morphine, no arm.
The empty pant leg blowing in the wind,
the basket of parts. It’s the phantom tingling
below the joint and the rub of the stump
and its round, raw skin. It’s the grainy
video scream as the hooded captor saws
at the neck "Allah Akbar!” god is great.
It’s the 12-year-olds with machetes
crossing the Sudan, hacking. It’s the look
of shock on the decapitated face.
It’s the twitching.
It’s the girl losing some piece of herself right now
in an explosion, a rape, a gangrenous disease.
It’s the boy burying what’s left. It’s your cousin
being fitted for a plastic prosthetic,
picturing his lover caressing the stub.
It’s the author writing a best-selling thriller
about a killer who collects clits in a butterfly box,
the butcher who grinds meat, the nanny
who pays good money for a soup bone.
Heart Time
For days now, I’ve been hearing my heart beat.
In my dreams, in the city wind, on the radio.
I’ve been counting up and down in the back of my brain.
Adding and subtracting like an insistent abacus,
the disks clicking their restless wooden bodies together
through the night and into the morning, stirring
coffee six times round, then seven, then eight.
It’s come to me that I can measure beauty this way,
by counting my presence in this final world.
I can calculate how much it matters to appreciate
the sun; to walk home with a barrette from my daughter’s
hair in my pocket, reminding me of time, soft skin,
the first kiss and its pulse, the throb of thunder
timed exactly before the lightning, the flash.
And with each beat, I draw further away from myself,
and into this lovely dance of dying, knowing only
that when it stops, I will hear nothing but your voice,
telling me the silence is full, the water, quiet.