Leia Darwish
LIBERTY/LIBERTY
you can’t hold your man…………….you can’t
hit a jet going six hundred miles per hour
…………….with a .50 calibre machine gun
the second week in June
will be when he gets caught cheating
when your napalm…………….gets the ally
June eighth twenty-nine
…………….the domestic-issue cover up
sixty-seven…………….the night you wait up
twenty-fourteen stricken from the record
…………….the typewriter’s letter h
sticking out of your left foot…………….once
there wasn’t even breath enough to say
…………….here…………….where the hull contracts
help…………….him on the couch like can I have my legs back
they’re falling asleep………… ….lucky
………………in the room where the torpedo hit
where he was seen coming………………out late at night
when the court said………………adultery
is hard to prove…………….so often as to make it a habit
Leia Darwish is a writer and editor based in Richmond, Virginia. Her poetry and nonfiction can be found in diode, The Journal, PANK, The Pinch, The Paris-American, and elsewhere.
Image credit: William Hook on Unsplash
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #24.
