Leslie F. Miller
Poetry
Leslie F. Miller likes to break things and put them back together in a random, yet tasteful, order. A writer, photographer, mosaicist, and graphic designer, she is the author of the nonfiction book Let Me Eat Cake: A Celebration of Flour, Sugar, Butter, Eggs, Vanilla, Baking Powder, and a Pinch of Salt (Simon & Schuster, April 2009). Her first collection of poetry, BOYGIRLBOYGIRL, was just published by Finishing Line Press and is available here.
intersection
of sheep, loquacious stream of sweaters baaa-baaa-ing across a single lane
of bendy road, narrow swath cut in confluence of corn and cattle.
you could lie here in the lazy sunshine watching the dandelion clocks,
waiting for time to ferment us, but I am not so still inside.
like memorial ribbon tourniquets on road signs
you stanch my speed, but I will fester here
among the deadly nightshade, the bucolic poisons
of pastured cows, milk coagulating in a barrel.
you grow from these fields. I am interred.
where I live, a barn is a bus shelter,
the used tire place is a crack conduit,
a man in a dress, his hair pomade slick,
checks his lofty goals with the corner psychic,
and old Moe waits for that spaceship to return.
but we can roll awhile in the hay loosed from bales dotting the landscape
keep this tardy pace for a day like a pair of rockers on a wraparound porch,
replace my verbs with whistle, mosey, meander, and wile; affix our hands,
intertwine our legs, connect delightful dots in a lonesome field of buttercups.
forget that perpendicular lives intersect only once. Or twice.
“ 'Intersection' is one of thirty or so Facebook poems, a project I began as a cure for writer's block. I solicit words from Facebook friends—one word each—and make a poem using up all the words, one per line. With the supplied words—some of them, like transhumance, difficult—I tell the love story of the country mouse and the city mouse. ”