Heat, by Susan L. Leary |
My brother is allowed to shower once a day at the jail & so every morning, a scalding. I would’ve thought the opposite. A raw-nerved shiver. A flood of winter that pinpricks the bone. But cold don’t leave an imprint, my brother says. 60 seconds: wash up, wash down—heat serving its purpose, sufficient even to cook up my brother’s Ramen Noodles & instant coffee from the commissary. Because only he can know the frank intimidation of water. The way it turns the skin red in a blitz & reveals to the self the wound that is one’s body. When I was a baby, my first word was hot. Hot, hot, I’d say, wobbling around the kitchen, my mouth as wide as my fingers that stretched outward towards the stove. How lucky I was to learn language without reckoning its meaning. To look up into adult eyes as translucent & abundant as water, while my brother, cool-veined & calloused, learned the instinct that forces the hand away. |
Susan L. Leary's poetry has been published in Arcturus (Chicago Review of Books), Posit, Whale Road Review, Pretty Owl Poetry, and others. She has been nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Anthology and is the author of Contraband Paradise (Main Street Rag, 2021) as well as the chapbook This Girl, Your Disciple (Finishing Line Press, 2019), which was a finalist for The Heartland Review Press Chapbook Prize and a semi-finalist for the Elyse Wolf Prize. She teaches English Composition at the University of Miami.