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10.29.2012

angry poetry corner: "consider the sun" by eugenia leigh

We're getting poetic up here. It's time for another installment of Angry Poetry Corner, a regular weekly spotlight on the work of API poets -- not necessarily angry -- curated by Cara, our Angry Asian Intern.

Because you could use a little more poetry in your life.

In the corner this week, a poem by Eugenia Leigh:

"Consider the Sun"

The winter God failed to jolt her young liver to life,
I wandered through a home of broken mill spokes.

Below the attic’s exposed insulation
leaned a stack of unhinged doors—the first

marked Have you found what you’re looking for,
a handwritten No below it-and beyond the doors

wobbled a lone dresser drawer holding a flask
and a book from 1948 called Come Be My Love.

Past a tapestry rolled to the ceiling slats,
I found a bare room where boys must have spilled

lagers and swapped Playboys next to the shelf
laced with webs. And in the corner of that room,

look:                  the jagged skull of a dead thing
who once swung its antlers at a live thing.

Imagine them both, wanting to live. Another chance
to consider the sun, put food to mouth.

Is it better to die in the struggle or to survive it,
then die decades later alone with a cognac, a book

and no fight left in your bones?
Eugenia Leigh is the author of Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows (forthcoming via Four Way Books, 2014), which was a finalist for both the National Poetry Series and the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Stalk her at www.eugenialeigh.com and tweet her @eugenialeigh.