Faculty/Staff Spotlight: Leah Poole Osowski, Emerging Writer-in-Residence

Domain: Eukarya

Wolf throat, words pace
but don’t exit the mouth.
The man in the office
across the hall is going bear hunting this weekend.

All I want to do is jump on the bears back
and keep my eyes closed forever.

Yesterday I saw twelve deer at various times,
in different places. They lounge like underfed models
under the super moon.

I’m trying to understand time as non-linear.
Lord, make me a tree
so I can shed half my mass in color.
Exist in a perpetual circle.

In a dream I still bring friends home to sleep
in my mother’s king bed,

or my dead grandfather still sits in the cottage
and no one knows why steam rises from his chair.

I’m trying to invoke a life
with an animal instinct.
Like running towards the woods.
Like climbing a tree as an appropriate response.

Two dead birds off the porch this week.
Mistook glass for sky.
I admit, I love the muted
thump their bodies make on impact.

But kneeling in the dirt, I line them up, apologize.

Their yellow-tipped tail feathers
so bright they shame the sun.

I cannot believe in this life that gutters a winged thing
such as this.
That bullets the wild.
Momentum removed for a dull thud.
I spit the wolf out
and he tears toward every direction that isn’t forward.

I spin the cedar waxwings
like limp bottles
looking for any aim to put my mouth on.

Temporally

How you can occur in two places at once. How the ocean
alters pale green to light-lost gunmetal. I had no idea this capacity

existed, until the sky showed its huge dry self.
Unobstructed. The sway between rooms. Ballet of tenses.
A decade, a swarm of mayflies, cast skin,
light intensity their cue for emergence.
The solar eclipse in totality. Two-minute night. A ring
in the ears. The way we’re only one dimension
away from time travel. Oh imagined life.
I slip you over my forearms like ice. The hind leg of a grasshopper
mid-bound. Portals open and shut like riptides.

Shores recede. Sandbars in the mouth. I want to change enough times
as to be hardly
recognizable as mammal.
Sweet fin-legged future, with your saltskin and baleen teeth, beat me
against the reef, force a different mode of breathing.

Vernal

The equinox passed
two equal halves
unnoticed. Day lined up
back to back with night.

Spring measuring their height
with her thawing hand.

Twelve hours tall each
and then a swell of light.

Coaxing buds and bare legs.
Pollen a tongue tip drug.

Crocus throats thrusting
through dirt, cicadas

turning seventeen scream.
Nine o’clock geothermal

blue. Your lagoon hands
holding anything they can get

their heat on. Dusk
a dish thrown at a wall.

A wall a row of poplars
overpopulating the yard

you can’t stop sleeping in
twenty Junes from now.

Primary, Primal

Mars so red in the western sky, how could it not give life?
Like the face after five sprints, ruddying its blush out,
color that proves to the earth, yes,
I can move across you with speed if I must.
Like the barns, just standing there, staring.
Confident in their role of multiplying lives.
And your sister, parked in the driveway one night, years ago,
ceaselessly honking her horn
as three mountain lions did their pacing,
muscle muscling in the taillights,
the red now focused on a species so brutally honest
in intent that her face must have drained of its color.
There’s a rumor that our blood is blue inside our bodies,
but the truth remains red, the confusion lying
in wavelengths of light penetrating the skin with different
degrees of success.
Essentially, life is taken so other life can endure.
This part makes sense.
The ripped-open field fox does not,
nor how my whole life, on walks,
I’d wrench a beach plum or some winterberries off their stems,
just to feel their light roundness, before tossing them aside.