02-24-2024
Leah Silvieus
Matthew 19:14
after Jericho Brown
for the camp girls
Heaven belongs to such as these
Your apostle taught us,
so Lord, let me not forget:
those six girlhood summers down
that two-lane highway, left— past
the seven-foot plastic Hereford bull
at Clearwater Junction; sleeping
in cast-off army tents
where forty-miles-away
might’ve been a different country, those
faraway towns’ names exotic:
Philipsburg, Frenchtown,
Wisdom, Choteau—
bless those mouths red
with Fla-Vor-Ice, singing
rise and shine and give God the glory,
glory. As we waited for the mess tent dinner bell
the counselors decreed,
the last shall be first
and the first shall be last
and we all turned ‘round in line
because we believed
that one day it’d be true.
Lord forget us not in our hour
of need— those who dug Dixie cups
from trash bins to tear into visions
of the Blessed Virgin, who stole change from Right to Life
coin banks to buy Ring Pops for our little sisters.
Bless us, Lord, we dirt-road orphans, grown now
and miles from the closest home—
girls once named for virtues
our mothers hoped we’d hold true:
Faith, Joy, and daughter after daughter
called Mercy.
WHEN ASKED WHERE I'M (REALLY) FROM
“To be Asian in America is to be quizzed, constantly, about your ethnicity. What are you? Where are you from? No, but where are your parents from?”
—Jeff Guo, The Washington Post
Between two halves of a canyon’s split lip whose namesake the streets sing— all that is holy after opening day of hunting season: Remington, Winchester, Pistol Drive. Full of sandstone, gunpowder. No-stoplight town always taking at least two kids each year, pulled under by river snag, huffing Krylon Gold, accident of gorge’s curve or gunshot. If asked, I’ll tell you where I was made: wanting nothing but escape, the only girl who knew how to play— called to accompany wherever there was need. High school musical auditions, weddings and ladies’ Christmas teas. I was the girl who could sight-read a melody but had trouble keeping time, whose door a mother’d come knocking on in the middle of the night, come asking for a song.
NOCTURNE WITH SEVEN ISLES
I.
From here, I climb the narrow island
through moon rock, shallows wide and white
as desert and survivor-littered:
jellyfish cruel and translucent in sea grass,
starfish drying beneath armor,
sand dollars melting black velvet.
Even the sea cannot contain itself:
I reel in a small sunfish, gill-torn,
but still I toss him back,
as if by returning alone—
as if salvation—
only the limp float of his bright underside
a thin slice of flame among the reeds.
I taste the salt on my lips,
wonder if this is how it began
for the woman who turned
against God to watch her only city burn.
II.
We unearth places we once lived, the house
sundered by lichen, drawers withering
with summer herbs, the mammal scent of soured boots,
cedar fronds rotting
rooftop gutters. Tell me
about the brass bed frame,
what love once wracked there
and of its leaving. Tell me
of each fountain swan, feathers greened with sea
air. Sing me the names of everything lost,
each ash and wing. Invent them if you must.
III.
I listen everywhere for the psalm
that echoed off the stone walls
in the winter chapel:
yet is their strength labor and sorrow;
for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.
Ives’ dissonant harmonies like walls shuddering
inward— we spend our days as a tale that is told—
sacrament, sacrilege alike an edge
against which we hollow
ourselves—
I sand the music as if the melody
could sculpt our sinews back to bone.
IV.
Months tide shores of unanswered letters;
I write you as if you were dead.
I think of collapse, its Latin roots
meaning to fall together— imagine
cathedral arches, spine-sharp
leaning to imprison
saints radiant in shards—
Now, too late, I understand
I did not mistake desire
but its direction— somewhere beyond—
a music half-remembering
itself.
Look how we fail in increments
like last century’s estates, opening
into stone arches;
even as we refuse
to go, see how the body takes us there, without
our blessing or consent.
V.
afterward, you exhaled quiet for once
possibly content for an hour we breathed
late light there two solitudes pooled together
then unlike time and time before I just turned
the brass knob and watched you leave our rucksack history
slung over your shoulder in that silence we discovered the door we’d razed cities and sabotaged bridges to find
VI.
I excavate a lamp
from the basement—
how satisfying to draw
the shade taut, to tear
bulb from carton and pull
the chain. To make light.
I need to see
what I agreed
to leave;
is it the light
I love or is it leaving
everything else in darkness?
The empty room asks:
Now, then, what do you want?
VII.
Here, tangerines like paper lanterns
wait for night to rob their glow.
Oil on the canal as if from a dreamer,
beneath. Here let us claw
match and flint; let us ask with fire
what the water has forgotten.
-from Arabilis selected by PoemoftheWeek.com Spring 2025 Guest Editor, Lee Herrick
Leah Silvieus was born in South Korea and adopted to the U.S. at three-months old. She grew up in small towns in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley and western Colorado. She is the author of Anemochory (Hyacinth Girl Press), Season of Dares (Bull City Press), Arabilis (Sundress Publications) and co-editor with Lee Herrick of the poetry anthology, The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit (Orison Books). She is a recipient of awards and fellowships from Kundiman, The Academy of American Poets, and Fulbright and serves as a mentor on The Brooklyn Poets Bridge. A 2019-2020 National Book Critics Circle Emerging Fellow, Leah serves as a senior books editor at Hyphen magazine and an associate editor at Marginalia Review of Books. Her reviews and criticism have appeared in the Harvard Review Online, The Believer, and elsewhere. She holds a BA from Whitworth University, an MFA from the University of Miami, and an MAR in Religion and Literature at Yale Divinity School/Institute of Sacred Music. She splits her time between New York and Florida working as a yacht chief stewardess.
