two poems

elichvar
Oct 14
2 min read

Late Summer, New House

by Leatha Kendrick

A locust rattles, sputters,

its first dog-day shriek

rising, stuttering away

like a rusty mower.

How is it that her brittle

nexus of breath and carapace

takes hold without history,

as if history

were a fandango

to be danced?

As if it’s mere

space singing time.

She makes herself

at home as we have done,

settled in our flimsy

brick shell, new-hatched

on this windy hill.

I breathe in her small I am

before the noose of cells

draws tight, leaves

only echoes to declare

we were here.

Gravity

Though we track it

to the subatomic level,

though we dissect weak attractors

and pick our way into the disappearing

heart of matter, we can’t explain it—

gravity—

or how it makes

things stick together—

you in the kitchen fixing coffee,

me orbiting the heart of our long marriage,

Solly waking up to the last day of the last week of school,

his sister singing in her bed, each of them planets spun off

in orbits invisible, elliptical.

My feet under the desk, the weight of suitcases

we drag to the car, the drag on the tires,

their grip that takes us

back to kids and grandchildren, rushing ahead

on a road of hours.

It’s in our knees and feet

as we break down, coming in

for some final landing.

We don’t even know

how aspirin works. The willow tree

whose bark first gave relief is

thousands of years gone.

Maybe this sag of meat on bone

is indeed a hologram,

a lattice-work of energy.

Each of us a shimmer, ferried across a span of time

a space we did not earn, cannot explain,

held in what we’ve taken, all this time,

for solid flesh.

(Oh, but I know the ache

of a body, the eager thrust

toward a beloved other,

the slow light

of your smile when we wake.)

Leatha Kendrick is the author of five volumes of poetry, most recently And Luckier (2020). Recent poems and essays appear in journals and anthologies, including Anthology of Appalachian Writers, Red Branch Review, Still: The Journal, Kansas City Review, and Troublesome Rising: A Thousand-Year Flood in Eastern Kentucky. Leatha’s MFA is from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Leatha is the recipient of the 2025 Judy Gaines Young Award from Transylvania University. She lives in Lexington, Kentucky.