SANDI LEIBOWITZ - POEMS

Sandi Leibowitz, author of THE BONE-COLLECTOR, EURYDICE SINGS, and GHOST-LIGHT, a quarantine journal in verse, lives in New York City with two ghost-dogs and the occasional dragon. Her speculative fiction and poetry has garnered second- and third-place Dwarf Stars, as well as nominations for the Elgin, Rhysling, Pushcart Prize, and Best of the Net awards. Her work appears in Spillwords, Sheila-Na-Gig, Trouvaille Review, Red Eft Review, Alien Buddha Press, Verse-Virtual, Newtown Literary, Frost Meadow Review, Corvid Queen, Uncanny, Liminality, and other magazines and anthologies.

Books
After Jen Mawson’s Photograph of the Same Name
​

​A window into emptiness.
Floorboards rotten as an ogre’s teeth.
Could any haunted house be more deserted
than this derelict Victorian,
waves of dead leaves
washed onto its porch?
Like corpses from a shipwreck,
limbs akimbo, clothes immodestly askew,
a heap of books
gives testimony that someone lived here once
who’s here no more.
For who would leave their own books
so untreasured?
They may be textbooks or volumes of verse,
scriptures or engineering manuals,
who can tell?
No librarian’s hand arranges them.
No survivor stacked them neatly in a tower.
Evidence of heartache, or violence,
or leastways carelessness--
and negligence can be the cruelest thing of all--
speak in the unthumbed pages
whose marginalia goes unread,
insights no one sees, inscriptions
—For Carla, On h r sixt enth bi th ay--
worn away by wind and mildew
and indifference.
 

Thistles
May 27, 2020
​

​Because construction’s stalled,
the scaffolding stays up around my building,
the protective netting preventing
the lawn from being mowed or weeded.
So now we have a meadow.
 
Considering how many residents complain
about the garden committee’s new additions,
botanical largesse of English-style perennials
instead of symmetrical borders of impatiens,
I might be the meadow’s only fan.
 
How they must abhor the long grasses
in gradients of amber, brown, and green,
their varying, untidy lengths
like the hair of a gathering of hippies,
tassels nodding with the weight of seeds
ready to sow more unmannerly progeny,
taking the place of cropped, unanimous turf.
 
Shepherd’s purse or some other pink
weed or wildflower
takes central stage amidst a froth of clover
white as cappuccino foam,
lascivious come-on to the bees.
 
Up front, where any visitor can’t miss it,
a solitary three-foot thistle grows and glowers.
When it was shorter,
I tried to tug it out with my bare hands,
learning that even their stems
come armed to the teeth.
Now it bristles like a Doberman gone rogue,
daring, “What you gonna do about it?”
One of its flowers bursts into purple
like an ad for Scottish tourism.
 
I root for it,
prickles and all.
New York disdains a sissy.
You need audacity
to ride out rough times like these.

 

Breath
June 2, 2020 
​

​It’s almost visible
now that we obsess,
red molecules of disease and death
suspended in the air,
lingering on bags and doorknobs.
 
Your own breath sounds exaggerated
through your mask, wettened by each exhalation.
You strain to breathe through cotton.
 
Do you have trouble breathing?
doctors ask, PSAs warn.
That’s the symptom to worry about.
 
I can’t breathe,
you’d think, as the disease
destroyed your lungs
 
I can’t breathe,
you’d panic before they induced the coma
so you could endure the ventilator,
the machine breathing for you
 
I can’t breathe
George Floyd’s exhales those words
with his last breath
 
he’s killed
knee to his neck,
as if it were a crime to breathe
while being black
 
The righteous protest while
MAGA agents loot, deface, and burn
Police attack with tear gas,
mow them down with cars
Their rubber bullets destroy eyes,
rip holes in skulls
 
I can’t breathe
 
the President deploys armed forces
against our citizens
National Guards stand at attention
like imperial stormtroopers on the Lincoln Memorial
 
I can’t breathe
 
helicopters swoop low over D.C. crowds
like hawks preying
 
instead of praying, Trump evicts
peaceful protestors from a church
to pose for the press like Hitler with a Bible  
 
a little girl can’t breathe
crying as her father pours milk down her face
to lessen the sting of pepper spray
 
America’s diseased,
and coronavirus isn’t the worst of it.
Hate’s gone viral.
Brutality’s gone viral.
Greed’s gone viral.
Selfishness has gone viral.
Corruption has gone viral.
But now so has outrage.
 
These fires can’t be dampened
by suffocating them.
There has been suffocation enough
 
Do you have trouble breathing?
 
 

 

How Jane Writes
​

​At night, poems buoy up in her mind
like downed trees in the river after storm
and she annoy hims, reaching for
her nest-side cache of bamboo pens
and tablets of banana leaf.
Tarzan grunts and rolls away,
shielding the nearest ear
with a protective hand.
 
She searches for a word
that doesn’t rhyme exactly but sounds,
and means but doesn’t quite say,
that doesn’t stutter, stomp, but almosts.
Sometimes she must hunt them,
stealthy as Tarzan himself.
Sometimes the prey eludes her.
She curses. A chimp
(no one they know) hoots a reminder
that she’s disturbed the jungle peace.
 
As she squeezes the purple-black berries
to fill the pen with ink,
the color reminds her of his eyes.
She smiles, tattoos him
with silly graffiti, the ticklish pen
waking him thoroughly
and his lust, so they make love
before, glistening with sweat
in the fire’s light, he turns away again,
and there’s the word waiting for her,
or its long-lost cousin, so
she writes the poem at last
and a new one after it.

 

​Defects

​All of my angels are made of flesh,
too heavy to risk flight. Instead
they pour clouds of aloe
on their rounded shoulders,
pining for skin of cream
 
Angels should be lean as sky,
not greedy for fat, wet plums
they suck from purpled hands;
they should not let the wind sift
their feathers with a lover’s fingers
or allow lute-strings’ silken
sound to stroke their eager ears.
 
My angels fail to notice
the thin-ankled girls of slender sin,
my anemic devils, who cough
and rattle loose their bones,
their scarlet watered down to fog,
too frail to raise a rumpus.