Poetry
Spring/Summer 2018
Precarious
by Steven Leyva
Precarious
slick cherry boughs labyrinthine
as steampunk pipework,
last night’s rain and leftover
torrid odor on the breeze,
daylight, and the moon are nude.
Baltimore’s skyline smolders
like a rusted through furnace
in a basement of heaven.
against an anvil of light
a black girl strikes the empty
streets with a plain kickball
until morning is fully dressed
in a house-robe and slippers
of laughter. Would anyone argue
laughing alone
in the cool after dawn
isn’t a sharp prayer,
as much as the first brushstroke
against primed canvas, or the pen-
ultimate hole rust eats
through a furnace?
and what of the industrious cherry
trees budding despite a summer
full of bullets to come?
Perhaps a bud is minor lit
candle on the boughs
which neither the breeze
nor the fog colored waxwing
can snuff. Perhaps the blossom
imagines a people to come.
​
Photo: Chuck Huru
Steven Leyva was born in New Orleans, Louisiana and raised in Houston, Texas. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 2 Bridges Review, Fledgling Rag, The Light Ekphrastic, The Cobalt Review, and Prairie Schooner. He is a Cave Canem fellow, the winner of the 2012 Cobalt Review Poetry Prize, and author of the chapbook Low Parish. Steven holds an MFA from the University of Baltimore, where he is an assistant professor in the Klein Family School of Communications Design.