STIRRING
Founded in 1999, Stirring is one of the oldest continuously publishing journals on the internet.
Stirring is an electronic quarterly journal.
Founded in 1999, Stirring is one of the oldest continuously publishing journals on the internet.
Stirring is an electronic quarterly journal.
DIANE LEBLANC
Even after you remove
the turtle, the tarot card,
and the last word,
your time capsule
bulges. You regret
filling the hummingbird
feeder before you left home.
By you I mean me.
By time capsule, a past
sulking, unsaid.
My regret is not syrup
dripping to the porch,
calling ants. My regret
is the bird consuming
its weight in sugar
and returning tomorrow
to the empty feeder.
After a neighbor
repairing his garden trellis
tells me rain
makes the melon,
I hold so tightly
this image of rain
inflating flesh
and seed
I almost forget
last night’s dream
of lions
twisting
their golden bodies
through hemlocks
and splashing
into a swimming pool,
creatures suddenly
too small for their bones,
then bored,
leaping from the water
and following me,
my flesh cinched
like a raincoat
on a clear day.
On Sunday mornings at Penn’s Market,
my father and I huddled in the dim aisle
in front of the deli case
waiting for the butcher to see us
through the small window of
the cutting room door.
When he appeared – hair matted, glasses smudged,
wiping his hands on a bloody apron –
he greeted my father by name
and shook his jowls about the price of gas
as he rolled our hot dogs
in clean white paper.
I’d go with my father to stare through the glass
at animals turned inside out, blooming red,
ribboned with pale fat.
But I saw, too, how the butcher taped our parcel,
priced it with a black marker, and handed it to my father
as if it were a heavy stone
before he returned to his real work of finding
a grain to follow, a muscle’s shape,
an animal within the animal.
Diane LeBlanc is a writer, teacher, and book artist with roots in Vermont, Wyoming, and Minnesota. She is the author of The Feast Delayed (Terrapin Books, 2021) and four poetry chapbooks. Poems and essays appear in Bellevue Literary Review, Cimarron Review, Mid-American Review, Stirring, Sweet Lit, and Southern Humanities Review, among others. Diane is a holistic life coach with emphasis in creativity practice. She is a professor and writer in residence at St. Olaf College. Read more at www.dianeleblancwriter.com .
