08-03-2026
ROBYN LEIGH LEAR
ON BEING LEARNED
But maybe this bridge being gone too has
learned him the Lord’s sense and judgment!
— William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
To be learned
is different
than to be taught.
Being taught
is a tendering.
Being learned
is a taking from.
An emptying.
A breaking forced
on an untamable
mare using folklore
held together
under threat
of the whip
and being
made lame.
Half heritage
& half harm,
one branded
is learned.
CUMMING DEPICTED AS A VIOLENT PASTORAL
1
Slathered in Malibu-scented
self-tanner to hide their bruised
cotton skin, soft as peaches
stippled with sun-kissed blonde
hairs on unshaved
legs & lips,
puberty taught them shame,
& health class
taught them how to shave naked.
Their hair lifted & sprayed,
teased like marigolds
make the grass a mess
in the neighbor’s neglected field.
Filled with creepers the cows won’t chew,
these thorned & horned weeds
grew in them the same as musk thistle
pricked at their need to be possessed
or pregnant to prove they had value
& could make something as original
as a wanted pregnancy.
Ashley wondered about virginity
when Dusty climbed on top of her
in the girl’s bathroom. He moaned
at his performance over her body
pressed against the linoleum floor.
Her head knocked against the toilet.
She took it like we all take it in the end.
2
Then they
separated us into sexes & made us
watch a woman give birth.
Wouldn’t let us close our eyes
when we realized she was just another bitch
on a fancy paper-lined bed.
Push after push after push, the pulse
of her body writhed like a horse bucking
against the limp body of her dead colt.
Stillborn.
The vet wrestled
the babe out of her womb.
Came out headfirst and dead,
covered in blood mixing with the red
Georgia clay. When the stillborn
was passed, they broke its body
to fit into the slim cement-cylinder
tomb at the center of our pasture.
How the mother horse
didn’t feed for weeks
as she searched for answers.
I didn’t
let a man touch me for two decades.
I knew that if he did, I’d end up in the pit
that lived under the grass pastures
where the horses grazed.
3
I still struggled with going home.
Above where I slept, my sister carved
her name in a heart with her rapist’s.
Mary loves W—, haunted me like scripture,
plagued the pews of Baptist churches,
now etched into the walls of hallowed homes.
NOTES ON TRACK MARKS
Grandpa said once,
Fifty scars make a man
so, between my sister’s toes,
there is a militia of mourners
to slow her hemorrhaging
memories of home.
She hides her scars well,
but the black pupils of her eyes
dilate into a hazel-colored junk-
yard, & now she doesn’t laugh like a girl.
Her strung-out voice howls
to the neighboring coyotes
hungry & desperate as a wild
bitch chained to a fencepost gnarls
near a house surrounded by trash.
She hides her scars well
enough to forget as junk
wages war over her body,
& between her toes
her war crimes remain hidden.
-from Yonderling, in progress
Robyn Leigh Lear is the creative director for April Gloaming Poetry, author of EKPHRASIS AS DIVINATION: AN INCANTATION CATALOGUE (UP Feb 2025), associate professor, and poet living in Nashville, TN. She is currently finalizing her second manuscript, Yonderling, written under the mentorship of Diane Seuss.
