TIMOTHY ASHLEY LEO

“I will detach my affection, mother,”                 “and fix it to this tree.”
“I will be bold, I will double my feet, walk twice as far, and find you
not there but here where I left you holding the steering wheel, turning
off cruise-control and turning off the interstate, pulling over to assure me
you would drive to the asylum—were it left open—for me. For me a
booster seat, a warped guardrail, a lamppost, a sturdy utility pole to wrap
around. Much like this tree.”  “This dash is my forehead, the fireman called
the cops and the ambulance only has one stretcher.”  “If you don’t foot the
bill, my god, the city will.”  Maya looks for a nail, she’s found the hammer,
and in her right hand hangs a red onion bag netted and heavy with fat.





“Rot my mouth, my teeth, my jaw away—lay me down, spread my calf
muscle and find my fibula, ligate its vessels, and make of the bone my
next mandible so that I may repeat this blessing, spit on your curse and rot
again.”  “I didn’t know saving you would let him walk free, leaving
me forever swaying by the river.”  “I am wet with you and wet with me
seeping through every pore and lacrimal duct, every channel and outlet
worked back to my borderless core.”  “My life-stuff is your labor, your
labor is my life. I never wanted my syrinx though I loved the numbness
after the pain, but this weakness, this tingling, this loss of hot and cold
won’t do, not in my legs, not in my arms, and please—not in my palms.”





“I wash your body now, I’ll wash it again after I force breath down
your mouth after I stop and your nieces, your nephews lay their hands
on your breast, the damp cloth balled in each whisperer’s fist.” “In each
loss a prior birth, a prior warmth, a mouth that never knew hunger for
heart was fed from heart, body from body. Now I’m jawbone from gill-
arches, I am. Bite. Crush. Chew.

                                                             Iron would not know rust without a touch
of chlorophyll, sky would not be blue, a worm-like animal would not push
out its mouth, spined and toothed and clawed to pull back in a notochord
through viscera, the battered debris of another frond-like creature of the sea.”





“I try crying until”  I  “cannot see. Try the thumb-sucking exercise, try acting out the illness, try nicking the lobe in two places; try big, try small, try surface, try safety, try a stage, a diet, feedback, fever dreams, method acting—the emotional labor of a service worker rattling off treatments for interstitial lung disease though bed-bound herself, demented, unable to butter toast without a helping hand. I will


keep living, I’ll go to the funeral games. This is my alley; come up it, come up it.”

Timothy Ashley Leo is a poetry editor for Dialogist. His work may be found in Conjunctions, Lana Turner, Narrative Magazine, and elsewhere. He holds an MPhil in History from Oxford University and a medical degree from Harvard University. A member of the surgical house staff at the University of Chicago, he lives in Hyde Park.