Four Poems
Julia Leverone

Leah Oates / Transitory Space, Prospect Park, Brooklyn, Winter Circle # 8

Leah Oates / Transitory Space, Prospect Park, Brooklyn, Winter Circle # 8

Hoot Owl

The windows of this room
the only ones to face the woods
a glass access
to sound

Tonight I hear the owl
or owls, one, two, one, moving in
then off

spawn
spondees

Iamb syncope, pyrrhus,
a battuta, marching, jazzing, poeming onward,
bard, my

great horned owl pronounces:

how like the dark throats thrum

Bluff

                                                      of a threshold

                          washed over with near-October
                                                     humid air,
mineral air
                          some storm.

We, cetaceous                             rise large to the
                          fleeting creatures

                          in thirty feet of swimming darkening
                                                     sun angling atop the lampposts.
                          A lone bird sails.

Trees quicken
the vegetation scampers to light

                          imagine

in thirty months
if let:
the wild sub-surface

            gecko
            mantis.

Cross-Section

Umbric slopes of canyon
overlaying gradient nutrient
permanent and shaped at once:
red soil or sun?
There were great rains.
All I could write of was tamped
down and wet. Returned
to the liminal, all is grand:
exposed and licked.
Alternating sandy loam,
the sands, the loamy sands.

Reckon II

She or he—
it's real, my need to discern, to have her
be brought closer to me, this
mantis, the first stone-skinned I'd ever
seen—appeared on the vertical
side of our step and still
as if she'd never let anything believe
she'd move. A man,
our neighbor I showed her to, mistook
my disbelief and shooed her—
she landed on my son's red push-car.
The first mantis I closely encountered
rested on the red of a hummingbird
feeder, waiting, which I mistook
for savagery; how real
the lines of prejudice
that lead you past the sweetened
belly of reality, bearing
little lives of purpose,
who do aid us though it's not about us,
it's not—
we eat hummingbirds too,
we draw our limbs in
when it's time for us to die,
or untense them and sway
and sway and ready
for something—

Julia Leverone holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature and an M.F.A. Her second chapbook was winner of the 2016 Claudia Emerson Poetry Chapbook Prize (forthcoming from JMWW), and her poems have appeared or will appear in Cimarron Review, Crab Orchard Review, Posit, Salamander, and more. Her translations from Spanish have been published in Witness, the Massachusetts Review, the Brooklyn Rail, and multiple other literary venues. Leverone works as an adjunct lecturer of Spanish and creative writing at the University of Texas at Dallas, and is the editor of Sakura Review.

Leah Oates has a B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design and a M.F.A. from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a Fulbright Fellow for graduate study at Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland.

In Toronto, Oates recently had a solo show at Black Cat Artspace and group shows at the Gladstone Hotel, John. Aird Gallery, Connections Gallery, Gallery 1313, Propeller Gallery, Artscape Wychwood Barns Community Gallery, Arta Gallery, and at The Papermill Gallery. Oates has been in group shows in the US at Wave Hill, Edward Hopper House, Chashama, Williamsburg Art Center, Metaphor Contemporary Art, Denise Bibro Fine Art, Nurture Art Gallery, and The Pen and Brush Gallery. Oates has had solo shows at Susan Eley Fine Art, The MTA Lightbox Project at 42nd Street, The Arsenal Gallery in Central Park, The Center for Book Arts and had had solo show nationally and internationally at Real Art Ways in Connecticut, Sara Nightingale Gallery in Long Island, Artemisia Gallery in Chicago and at Galerie Joella in Turku, Finland.