Poetry by Timothy Ashley Leo

     Damian Munoz CC




THE FIRST SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME


My body comes back to me on a train

in a car with twenty-eight exits, arrows

through windows on the sign, my body

spic and span, I’m told, blessed and bathed

in the blood of christ. Oh, I’m precedented.

No possession, Poseidon. After death:

gender, a welcome vertigo, proof


​
that something real is real – the flutter,

the feather, the blue. The mask tied behind 

the neck, I-L-I-A-D in big block letters

on the sleeve, rust red spine. Ambient velvet, 

this body, a loden armchair cushion, air-

brakes past the doorway – the street’s

season hums in the ribs, my ribs



bathed, they say, and blessed. A hand 

becomes a hand, a hold of heft and desire

held, tucked away in a white wood box

its edges set with a trim of obsidian.

The sole custodian, my body, I never 

knew the river the whale the storm

the sea. I needed a better word for linger.



I kept trying to heal with one hand

what the other injured; I keep trying

to predict where Venus will rise. 

Touch their talismans, they say, 

my body the fir tree the weather.

Real glass runs, a teacher told me,

I’ve seen the drip in the pane.


​
They bathe me, my body, a strophe
​
bent before a blade.  I wash it

and ask:  when is it going to rain. 

​


Timothy Ashley Leo is an editor for DIALOGIST. His work appears in Annulet, The Cincinnati Review, Denver Quarterly, Lana Turner, Nat. Brut and elsewhere. He lives in Chicago. timothyleo.com/work