Happy birthday, Big Other contributor Tony Leuzzi! Celebrate by reading this superb suite of Leuzzi poems we published in 2025!
1: Frame 22, 2007
Our clouded heads dissolve to cloud. Some boy—
enthralled by giant birds—jigs and stomps
in pools of searing grass. He’s unaware, it seems,
of us holding flight against our ancient breasts.
But we did not intend this life. Your shoulder
left you years ago. I kept my feet, stood flat
yet firm while brush and evergreen behind us
rose, like walls to blot horizon. I could not
embrace your mother. You believed your father’s
knives. Together, we side-stepped three wars,
saved coins, plucked geese, and feared we’d fade,
like murals advertising dyes. The boy is
everyone’s but ours. His dance reclaims what we
have lost: careless afternoons in June
the turn toward sun the naked thighs
2: Frame 16, 2007
September is a row of weary bungalows. They crowd
the sloping shore, like teeth tight spaces
in between them clogged with fleabane, creeper, thistle wheat.
Rooms store absence—free of charge—while elms
grow fat as aunts, expire. White clover
runs amok in grass. Sky tumbles into slanted wire.
From passing cars, new lovers gawk, then ride
through rain for dry motels determined
not to caw, like blackbirds fading on the papered walls.
That rain is notional imagined to avoid
long views. I—a boy of eight or nine—
press my face against the ground and beg
the worms that burrow there to teach me
how to grow again knowing someday I’ll be torn
for reasons I won’t understand. A girl
I loved once studies me, invites the wind
to tumble through her prairie hair. She stands
too tall and leans away affording her long shadow shade.
3: Frame 20, 2007
This room holds silhouettes and skin, right angles
ghosted over pine. We float in shade, face
brilliant dawn, and glean brown needles poking through
the rumpled waves of eiderdown. Off-white—
these walls of in-between. I hold tomorrow
to my breast. Torches burn a distant cloth
blue as hands that light our dark. The white you were
a day before has marbleized to sculpted stone.
Ambition rears its head as straw. A barefoot step
through broken limbs means never climbing
out of green. I watch you go. New roads wind
through our window panes—
but what we leave we carry home.
4: Frame 16, 2008
The question isn’t who belongs. Look hard enough
you’ll see the sea rise vertical and join at angles
crushing us, rerouting beige from cubicle to burning sand.
Some lean on glass, embrace new phones, and swim
in poly-blended folds. Others wear the open light
exposed to be exposed by caution stripping pavements
into blur. If worry traffics in “what-ifs,” pleasure
trades in actuals. All pain paints white. The air is
pocked with stagnant stars. What snuffs a candle
dark is rage. The window’s pane will not be moved.
Worse than gazing in, we pass then trample coins purse pursuit.
5: Frame 57, 2008
You hug your knees in Oregon, dream your only son—
burned pale—will witness God in fevered sand.
The phrase is zone of sacrifice, where braided chords
of hemp knot tighten the hooves that once ploughed
fields of dust. But all you know for certain is that
where begins with else and fears the boy
has learned this grammar, too. Who taught him how
to face the sun? To fix his gaze on pipes and stones?
Those crude, effective tools still serve the rigors
of belief: The beast’s unceasing groans last hours.
In sleep, you turn, your limbs gold leaf. Dappled shade
before you yields to pyramids of light, a wreath.
(Image: Tierney Gearon’s Explosure, Frame 13, 2008)
