I, the Unruliest Flower, Buried Winter

On a summer evening in my backyard. I buried
a small girl who resembled no one I knew with a pack
of three-legged wolves. Tamed the day’s mistakes
one by one, then flung them into the night’s fist
like ivories. They say the first breath is shelter or experiment,
though find me a girl who forgets no is an anagram
of manhood, that the sixth sense is speech. Words
heaved up from the chest & filling the mouth
like rainwater, like a silk-spun gown. A wolf reborn
& pawing at a phantom limb, the wounds tasting more
of sugar than blood. There is always something
peculiar on the underside of the fabric, roses erupting
through the earth with the muscle of language-scented
beasts. The afterlife entertains not what is good
or bad, only what happened & a girl will take a gun
to her head if it meant the girl were loved. Invent a name
for herself she can survive. Remind me, again,
the lesson. That the stars are the night’s pierced ears?
Were we to lose our senses, we’d still know awe.

Susan L. Leary is the author of A Buffet Table Fit for Queens (Small Harbor Publishing, 2023), winner of the Washburn Prize; Contraband Paradise (Main Street Rag, 2021); and the chapbook, This Girl, Your Disciple (Finishing Line Press, 2019), finalist for The Heartland Review Press Chapbook Prize and semi-finalist for the Elyse Wolf Prize with Slate Roof Press. Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared in such places as Superstition Review, Tar River Poetry, Tahoma Literary Review, and Pithead Chapel. She holds an MFA from the University of Miami, where she also teaches Writing Studies. Visit her at www.susanlleary.com.