Julia Leverone

Anew

Look upon me.
Minerva’s done this.
In the blue depths
human hair floats willfully
and now, above,
mine slithers, fixed;
I am in love with it.

As far as Poseidon,
I remember clearly
sliding throughout the bulge of the sea,
some of it getting in me —
that it made me jolt and buck
with its implacable shifting, its twisting.

Released like some bone-bereft jellyfish,
I am now one of those, all
head and hair, and hope
never to return to the beforehand;
I am a mother of myth.

Cursed by my kind,
I am more than what were once my kind;
winged horses burst from me
Medusa,
Medusae.

Naturalist

A material thing on the verge of being split
can emit light, the energy surging through it
causing triboluminescence.
The force of keeping
together against pulling away — earthquakes
do it, burst into short show.
Light
renouncing: though the words we have for it
sound slow, are a mouthful, like the day too full

of light in the far north in the summer: 3
a.m. and the sun on water dancing,
never quite faded.
But that’s a tipping
and a siphoning, a sky refilling — not an avalanche
you might miss —

when you came to me, smiling,
there was already a tearing: I bit your skin,
I pulled away,
but understand that I was forming
bonds for both: it was fire working
for adhesion, a little necessary repulsion.

Julia Leverone is an instructor of Spanish and creative writing. She has two chapbooks; Little Escape, winner of the Claudia Emerson Poetry Chapbook Award, will emerge in 2017. Her translations from the Spanish have appeared or are forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Witness, and elsewhere. A comparatist in office and in her bones, she is from Massachusetts, and lives in Texas.
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About Posit Editor

Susan Lewis (susanlewis.net) is the Editor-in-chief and founder of Posit (positjournal.com) and the author of ten books and chapbooks, including Zoom (winner of the Washington Prize), Heisenberg's Salon, This Visit, and State of the Union. Her poetry has appeared in anthologies such as Walkers in the City (Rain Taxi), They Said (Black Lawrence Press), and Resist Much, Obey Little (Dispatches/Spuyten Duyvil), as well as in journals such as Agni, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions online, Diode, Interim, New American Writing, and VOLT.