Two Poems

by Juliana Leslie

Woody Divers Love Planet Libra

She said we love the speculative nature of thingness in penny red a movement of fingers in a line of seesaws and beeswax If it’s enough to cave among the shy repeating scarlet and braiding suns better to embrace an expansive niche under all those photons to be green and dangerous that’s all I can say it’s light if it's light or nothing

Syllables Are Romantic

There is no one now in the script above the grass My arms around a tree your sweater on my ankles a figure from the canopy overhead when the face of the canopy divides the tree * Moon is a perfect fifth wheel I wish a hem of now I edge yet unnoticed walking mums runner hands open I open out to the blow below zero * Someone wonders it’s elegiac to think about time Someone magenta interrupts herself in the off-space of feminine nouns being unfamiliar with eros and edges * See a thrush of summer braids waxwings candled in a bundle of trees See the mind as something similar and pulled apart like tacit arches flyers more distant in a pavilion * The face of the moon evicted the moon of her body either hummingbird or the thing itself or lemon balm working spoons into patchwork sweet line of heat hatcheting what’s left * Helium helps pull air apart from paradox moves liquid into an index What pulls you from praying mantis what asks the difference between mercury and current slip and circle * See penny whistle cream golden sun everything in a boundary and what’s not It’s a blossom that accumulates Every pencil in California every hip between curtains of the sea and the sea

Juliana Leslie

Juliana Leslie is the author ofMore Radiant Signal(Letter Machine Editions, 2010) and Green Is for World, which is just out from Coffee House Press. She lives in Santa Cruz, CA.