Sample Poems by Leilani Hall

Lost Sight

    for A.T. Hall, III

When I found out you lost sight
in your left eye, the news falling
off mother’s tongue like molasses,
I thought of the dark room she had locked
us in, hiding her children like liquor
from any takers. I thought, now,
you will never be able to escape with me,
sneaking like frightened cats out of the room,
the hair stiff on the back of our necks. You
will always live one-half in that darkness,
learning to catch your breath from the cupboard,
spying on your grief as if it were the only
visible image of yourself, fixing it
on your mantel, a small trophy
with one eye missing.

Procession

I recall the yellow house on the bank,
the heavy porch overlooking the park
where sugar maples grew, a maze of trunks
I ran through, breathlessly gathering leaves
and imagining a huge burning pyre,
but could not gather the courage
to sacrifice anything, not even the damaged worm
under the walnut’s slow rot.

When father came home from the hospital,
voices were small because nothing could be larger
than his pain, the yellow and green
that filled his eyes and stained his skin
the color of an envious man. So much damage,
the doctors said, before we caught it,
the cancer a wild sweating horse tearing
across fresh crops, farmhands stumbling,
fumbling with ropes.

I think of the white smoke
of his pipe, billowing on the porch,
following the wave of drying sheets;
the smell, heady like honeysuckle,
followed me to school and home again
to him on the porch, the sun radiating
the cloud, brilliant and white,
that rose from his mouth.

To a Pulaski County Prisoner

Walk to the window in your cell.  Look
far past the twisted steel fence, dusty

fields thick with patches of grass, small towns
And their pumpkin festivals.

squint your eyes over Greensborough,
where every night a man lays his hands

on his daughter, where a daughter cannot be
clean enough.         Look at me

in Bates in a salvage yard where your car sits,
folded envelope in the front seat, pictures

of your children, Elissa, Jimmy, your wife, Carla.
Watch me find your list of Inmate Rules, see me

slip your life in my pocket.

Knowing

I picture you
over her small body,
your hips curving into her,
bowed like a fallen pine, bent as if
your knees were sunk into small
tidal pools in the sheets. You seem unsteady,
off-balance in the heat, your shoulders
shake in effort, your mouth set open
breathing, and I, unable to look away,
think of the beach in Chicama, how you again
and again laid your body hard
over a board in the face
of a fifteen-foot reef wave
because you didn’t know,
didn’t know not to.