#62: Two Poems by Anna Leahy

Editor’s Note:  Anna Leahy was on the inaugural Editorial Board of Redux.

~This poem previously appeared in Rhino (2003).

Recidivism

            Hill Correctional Center, 1991

The boys huddle on the playground,

whistle and play kickball like inmates trading

cigarettes—one with his lips

threaded together and him not saying

but listening to all he can think of now,

and another’s stare like someone

who knows it is twenty-four hours from

here to there, there to here,

like a soldier remembering limbs,

and the variety of ways they laugh and touch

to distinguish and rank themselves—

and their hands, all their hands

like my hands, simple, almost indistinguishable

like rosary beads and their repeated prayers,

even the small shiny space between

the Our Father and the Hail Mary:

As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever

shall be, world without end.

I know of their uniforms—light

blue shirts, dark blue trousers, repeated wear,

a way to equalize with fabric

the rich kid and the poor kid,

the straight-A student and the one

who was left behind like the sixteen-year-old

who tried to kiss me,

put his big hands on me,

the way it made me feel, the forgetting

of the prayer—O my God,

I am heartily sorry for having offended thee

and I detest all my sins—the need

to revise later, the rapist and the carpenter

and the murderer and the altar boy, all the same,

just look. What else can you do

when the priest asks you

to hit him to help him

atone for his sins and be forgiven

but pick up the sturdy two-by-four

or that shiny chain with the nails

and swing away?

*****

 

~This poem previously appeared in Cimarron Review (Winter 2001).

Anatomy Class

We halved sheep’s eyes and hearts,

sliced frogs and pinned their skins down--

female frogs with tiny, black eggs

scooped gently from their bellies

and males frogs--and animal parts

with no sex, no attachment

to a particular body. Remember the walk

to the boys’ school, the blood taken

from fingers, our cat spread on the slate table,

its eyes closed and its mouth open,

teeth exposed and tongue rippled slightly,

curled up at the tip as if to pant.

With its limbs stretched and tied, reaching,

I cut precisely as if it were a delicate, important

process, an art with short knives and scissors,

from jaw to rectum and then across,

top and bottom, so the dull-gray underside

of the skin could be pulled away and opened

like the frog, like shutters on a window.

Once I had first split the hole under the jaw,

all the rest was easy:

the mesentery, the complicated

blood vessels, the pericardium,

the heart itself a solid orb,

the esophagus and intestines like ropework,

the liver, the kidneys, the womb.

Most dissection cats are female,

often pregnant with three or four fetuses,

extra specimens, examples of development,

of what happens when and how things begin.

Best to be put down before the birthing,

before there are more mouths to feed,

more cats to kill. Best

to preserve them, put them

in plastic bags, ship them

to students who cut cats open

to learn about themselves, their own complicated

blood vessels, their own stomachs,

their livers and kidneys and muscles and bones,

my own heart and womb

revealed with a few proper slices

and the willingness to keep cutting.

*****

THE STORY BEHIND THE POEMS

“Recidivism” emerged when my poet-friend Nancy Kuhl heard me say the word recidivism and challenged me to write a poem with that title. I taught writing at Hill Correctional Center for one semester, so I combined some of those memories with my memories of being a student at a Catholic elementary school. The inmates and my earlier classmates really did wear the same uniform of dark blue pants and light blue shirts.

            “Anatomy Class” draws from memories of my senior year of high school at Sacred Heart Academy, when I took a physiology class at the adjacent boys’ school. The course’s big project was cat dissection. What I remember most is that the handful of girls in the class were far less squeamish than most of the boys.

*****

ABOUT ANNA LEAHY

Anna Leahy’s Constituents of Matter won the Wick Poetry Prize. Her poems and creative nonfiction appear in journals such as Crab Orchard Review, Cream City Review, The Pinch, The Southern Review, and others. She directs Tabula Poetica: The Center for Poetry at Chapman University and co-writes Lofty Ambitions blog at http://loftyambitions.wordpress.com.