Steven Leyva

Poetry

Steven Leyva was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, and raised in Houston, Texas. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 2 Bridges Review, Scalawag, Nashville Review, jubilat, Vinyl, and Prairie Schooner. He is a Cave Canem fellow and author of the chapbook Low Parish. Steven holds an MFA from the University of Baltimore, where he is an assistant professor in the Klein Family School of Communications Design.

How Our Sons Learned to Fight

How about we end on the ear, cleaned of dust by a drum kit, the lowest note in the scale, the same chest thumping tableau of two men disrobed and so close their fears thin to apple skin. We ain’t hear nothing. We forget whose breath broke the silence. A tape deck stuck on fast forward. The punch bowl shattered on its own, the body blows we did not throw. Get low get low echoing in the speakers. We remember our fathers saying throw the first fist and buck. We remember we invented our fathers’ advice about how to fight another man, because we did not know how to begin a love, only how to bruise the end.

“ Lately, I have been curious about the relationship between despair and tenderness. That thinking evoked imagery from the only two physical fights and the many near fights I participated in as an adolescent. The blustering, bluffing, and embracing reminded me of a kind of choreography and some of the elements of Laban Movement Analysis.   ”