Michele Leavitt
SHEEPSCOT WELLSPRING CEMETERY

Mercury shrinks to the bottom of the gauge,
and you follow the stone wall to a gap
too narrow for more than one, past
a granite foundation pit, an abandoned orchard,
and down through a dark hemlock stand
to the ice choking the headwaters.

You imagine the gurgle of strangled water,
the unbreathable gap between ice
and slush, and you’re grateful for spaces
between stones in the wall, where your breath,
which has now left you for good,
collects with the fresh snow.

Michele Leavitt, a poet and essayist, is also a high school dropout, hepatitis C survivor, and former trial attorney. In 2016, her essays appeared in Narratively, Guernica, and Catapult. Poems appear most recently in North American Review, concis, and Hermeneutic Chaos. She’s the author of the Kindle Singles memoir, Walk Away.

Image credit: Tom Hilton on Flickr

Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #16.