Keith Leonard
Keith Leonard is the author of the poetry collection Ramshackle Ode (Mainer/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016). His poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in The Believer, New England Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Keith has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and the Ohio Arts Council. He lives in Columbus, Ohio. Source
A Brief History of Silence
In the dark, I could read the stiff salt
of your cheeks like Braille. What more
could anyone want than to crease history
into a paper boat and feed the thing
to a riptide? I wore a tooth-pocked tongue
filled with old curses. You too.
Thought as many wishes
as there are pills in a pharmacy.
When I slept, my dreams
shook like a brood from a mob,
the sheets spindled into a tapestry
the fridge lumbered to life down the hall.
Published:
None
Length:
Shorty
Literary Movements:
Contemporary
Anthology Years:
2024
Themes:
Memory & The Past
Literary Devices:
Quatrain
A stanza made of four lines.
Rhetorical Question
a question asked for effect, not necessarily to be answered
Simile
a comparison between two unlike things using the words “like” or “as”