Cade Leebron

I SAY YOUR NAME INTO EMPTY WINDOWS

Listen to the audio version.

You'd say, aren't windows always empty? Pull
me back through the frame. A room. Windows are
empty until a body slips through. Holes
in my brain leave me sieve-like, straining. You're
fluid through tissue, skirting the crux of
me. Your hand up my skirt two weeks ago.
Remember those years when everyone loved
defenestration? Caught in theory glow,
the relative height. How far up lets me
break open on the way down, strew barren
seats into fields? Oh, but too late. If three
stories' flight won't kill you, what does? I spin
into the fall. How will all this stored force
feel? The yard I land in is called remorse.

* * *

GRAY BLUE YELLOW GREEN

Listen to the audio version.

At a reading in an art gallery—I have questions about our non-future
together and you're answerless. I have questions about our bright past

and you're all revisionist, unable to allow whatever rose-filled bloom
town we built up before. That must be hard. Like if you insist on only

one emotion or opinion at a time, how do you pick? You're holding my
hand like someone paid you off, like I might not be here. I'm thinking

I don't wish you other love in the future, which is not my most generous
thought. I'm coloring on the paper tablecloth with crayons and somehow

I think I need both hands for that. I'm feeling both things, if you needed
a tutorial. Like god I cannot wait for you to be gone and also never fucking

leave me, let's do this stagnant fake thing for as long as we can manage.
The poet has slides to go with each of her poems and I know you think

that's stupid, you think crayons at a reading are stupid. Love is: knowing
things the other person hates without having to ask. Which is mainly me

explaining why I don't want you to tell me how much you hated the slides
later, at dinner, or when we're picking TV to watch so we don't have to talk,

or when the ring you got me forever ago will live in your wallet instead of
on my finger, when I'll have lost track of you entirely. The waxy brain

cells lie scrawled across the table, waiting for us to give in and dissolve.

 

Cade Leebron lives in Columbus, OH. She holds an MFA from The Ohio State University, where she served as an editor at The Journal. Her work has appeared in The Boiler, American Literary Review, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She exists online at www.mslifeisbestlife.com, and on Twitter, @CadeyLadey.