Myriad Worm
[segments of ten]
She calls with an announcement of fourteen
apples, offers me seven. We each live
alone; she bought fourteen because of the
sale, but wouldn’t I love to help eat half
before rot sets in? No, I say. But they’re
Jonagolds, she says, the way she told me
she loved me so much she paid to be art
-ificially inseminated (twice,
the first time didn’t take) just so I could
be born. Later, on my doorstep, as though
nothing had been mentioned, the lopsided
bag, seven sweet wombs, each one filled with ten
unpredictable seeds of guilt and debt.
Watson at Baker Street
“You know, Holmes, there’s just one thing
I still don’t understand,” he says, rolling over
to face the east window, where drops of gray rain
on the glass ooze down to pool on the sill
like clues, each a lens distorting or magnifying
the golden spark in its heart, caught or stolen
from the gas-lamp on the corner below,
gold like the dusty curtains, and the dressing gown
draped carelessly over the back of a chair,
arms dangling intimately, comfortably limp,
and the gold silk sheets which rustle and whisper
as the greater man stretches, fumbles a hand
on the bedside table for his pipe, and sighs.
“Yes, Watson. Believe me, I know.”
Kent Leatham is a poet and translator whose work has appeared in dozens of journals and anthologies in the U.S. and abroad, including Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Fence, Able Muse, and Poetry Quarterly. He received an MFA from Emerson College and a BA from Pacific Lutheran University. He was born and raised on the Monterey Peninsula, and currently teaches writing at California State University Monterey Bay.
[segments of ten]
She calls with an announcement of fourteen
apples, offers me seven. We each live
alone; she bought fourteen because of the
sale, but wouldn’t I love to help eat half
before rot sets in? No, I say. But they’re
Jonagolds, she says, the way she told me
she loved me so much she paid to be art
-ificially inseminated (twice,
the first time didn’t take) just so I could
be born. Later, on my doorstep, as though
nothing had been mentioned, the lopsided
bag, seven sweet wombs, each one filled with ten
unpredictable seeds of guilt and debt.
Watson at Baker Street
“You know, Holmes, there’s just one thing
I still don’t understand,” he says, rolling over
to face the east window, where drops of gray rain
on the glass ooze down to pool on the sill
like clues, each a lens distorting or magnifying
the golden spark in its heart, caught or stolen
from the gas-lamp on the corner below,
gold like the dusty curtains, and the dressing gown
draped carelessly over the back of a chair,
arms dangling intimately, comfortably limp,
and the gold silk sheets which rustle and whisper
as the greater man stretches, fumbles a hand
on the bedside table for his pipe, and sighs.
“Yes, Watson. Believe me, I know.”
Kent Leatham is a poet and translator whose work has appeared in dozens of journals and anthologies in the U.S. and abroad, including Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Fence, Able Muse, and Poetry Quarterly. He received an MFA from Emerson College and a BA from Pacific Lutheran University. He was born and raised on the Monterey Peninsula, and currently teaches writing at California State University Monterey Bay.
