Daniel Leonard

 

Ante

It ain’t my day just yet.
Tomorrow’s odds look better.
Yesterday I took that bet
but all it got was yetter.
 
 

Wuchak

A woodchuck won’t chuck any wood.
She hogs the ground, as groundhogs should.
The rodent doesn’t warrant blame:
we colonists call beasts our name.

 

Falling Feeling

To alight
aright
is innate
for a cat.

We can’t
divert
defeat
like that.

 

Delicacy

She’s forced
to embellish,
coating harms
with culture,
so it annoys her

when boors
take her charms
as shellfish
overtures
and order oyster.

 

Foot Fault

The hearts of rocks are also hard.
If shattered, every part’s a shard.
We walk a molten-middled planet
taking shaky ground for granite.

 

Daniel Leonard (Poetry ’15) still haunts the halls of 236’s numbersake, now as a doctoral student in English literature. Some say on foggy days you can hear the snap of his Tupperware during class breaks and catch whiffs of jelly and peanut butter as they waft through Creative Writing. His work is forthcoming in Dragons of the Prime, a children’s anthology of poems about dinosaurs.