Poetry By Naomi Bess Leimsider

      Ron Gilbert CC



Origin Story 


I was young, not yet named, and super cool, you know, so I went where you'd go down to the party part of the old-world City. The City liked me dirty, expected my confession, demanded my redemption. Motherless, unmoored, wild to the trained eye, restless in my bones, easily flattered, taken in by the promise of magic. Mouth dry and powdery, feeling so loose I might've spun off into space, but I stood there with my violence and my sword for cutting and my nameless face. Unnamed, I named myself. 

I was hunting, and every day was Feast Day. It was the end of the last summer before the first fall. All the men and more men and more with their deviled egg faces and boiled sausage fingers, all drunk with house red dirty mouths and bewildered John the Baptist faces. Entertainment in those days were beheadings in the evenings: sword, of course, not guillotine. Some people get to do whatever they choose, but I was raised to be the dancing daughter. Barefoot, braceleted, draped in silver and smooth precious stones. Only a matter of time until all I wanted was to draw blood, break bones. This dance, this ceremony, how I was in the world: on my hands like a gypsy, on my feet but quivering, on my stomach and unveiled. 

I descended down to the City under the stairs, way, way down to a sliver of a silent space in a vast warren of a place. Tunnels twisting this way and that. Pipes of cool soil coiled around and around and around. Thirsty in the back of the throat. Hair knotted thick to the scalp. Red dirt under square filed nails. A young man offered me a joint of nerve gas sweet smoke spiked with white dust: did I want to party or what? Somehow he knew what I craved. The ugly aching beauty of a severed head, surprised eyes, an astonished face on the wall for all to see, another notch on my head-belt, and a trophy for me. I thought nobody was a murderer like me. Got muscular like me. Found breathless grunting strength like me. Who needs whose permission to leave? He held the door open for me.

How do you know who is the devil and who is the savior? You don't. The greatest riddle ever told: did I choose him, or did he choose me? Still, wrap up his perishable head and keep his cold lips fresh for me. Just a young woman and a man's head on a plate: nothing else here to see. He was the epitome of eyes everywhere, both the light and the darkness. He didn't look the way you think he might: such unvarnished beauty. His face chiseled marble; a church worship statue face. A bright morning star. Pupiled eyes, wavy hair, a stone magnificent body. His wrinkled and unfurled robes folded in all the right places. A museum piece, once quite alive, but no longer, and not for a long, long time. 

I didn't know what was ahead of it, the future of it. I couldn't recognize a world disappearing; I've never understood confession. When I heard whispering in my ear, I freely entered the conversation: there is no other explanation. Things get lost. People, too. The world was waiting, and it has little patience for poor mortals, peasant girls, smoking something with a stranger under the stairs of the City. 

The texture of his mind in mine was new, but I did understand the cost of his bargain. The smell of smoke, sweet cancerous air, exhaled by one who is a watcher, who has been cast out, who has, quite clearly, fallen. I inhaled, and realized, was suddenly aware of, the truth of the next moment even before it happened, even before the flipped feel of losing grip on time itself: I will fall, too. Where once my two feet were solid on the ground, the horizon line, my eye-level, turned around, upside down. The sky meets the sea meets the soft soil. Into the abyss, like others newly named, destined to wake up alone. He knows me, either I chose him, or he chose me, but this was an imprint of my 
existence in the universe. I got out. When I lost the world, hit the floor, I knew I wouldn’t forget and wouldn’t forget that I will outlive them all.

I woke up alone. Alone like a sudden exodus, a calamity, catastrophe, a complete extinguishing of all except one. Not a single other person in the breathing City, but then the walls exhaled; the release such a spectacular sound. Some blood on my face. Lips: split, sore. Nose: soft but solid. Body: slightly tender, bruised. Spoons, shots, spilled bottles, rolled bills all proof that he is still here somewhere. Time moved forward, but I lost my violence, my sword. The weight of what was coming: significant rupture, howling loss, the bad nights were still far into the future; in that moment, I could leave, and I was all the lightness in the world. 

The City and I were so young. Even then I knew there was no real way up, or back. These days, I dream of time in irregular lines, angles measured, marked off: the jagged edges at the end of existence. Once I was born, but after the first conversion, remained unnamed. I started living, have been alive all this time. Alive without redemption, like the City, but he cuts through the noise of the world with my grand bargain, my dirty exchange. The devil is in the details, so when I slip back through the door, I can see my beginning, also my end, and I know the way I knew it once and never will again.



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​Naomi Bess Leimsider has published poems, flash fiction, and short stories in Wild Roof Journal, Planisphere Quarterly, Little Somethings Press, Syncopation Literary Journal, On the Seawall, St. Katherine Review, Exquisite Pandemic, Orca, A Literary Journal, Hamilton Stone Review, Rogue Agent Journal, Coffin Bell Journal, Hole in the Head Review, Newtown Literary, Otis Nebula, Quarterly West, The Adirondack Review, Summerset Review, Blood Lotus Journal, Pindeldyboz, 13 Warriors, Slow Trains, Zone 3, Drunkenboat, and The Brooklyn Review. In addition, she has been a finalist for the Saguaro Poetry Prize and the Tiny Fork Chapbook Contest, and she received a Pushcart Prize nomination this year.