Leah Browning

Leah Browning Poems

Skin scrubbed clean and glowing
after a shower, the scent of shampoo.

Lying in bed on a winter morning
...

After a few days, you know how to navigate
one-handed, how to fold the baby into
the nook of your arm. Nursing, that most natural
and impossible task, becomes second nature.
...

After work, I follow as she does
the shopping. I see that you still love
shrimp, and a plain green salad.
...

The snow falls in petals, as if, just outside
my range of vision, there is a wedding taking place
in the dim blue light of a winter morning.
...

He has a tattoo of your name on his left bicep,
a relic from his time in the Navy.

You know all of his freckles and scars,
...

After all the months of anticipation and dread,
instead of handing out questions, the teacher
claps her hands and lets us go home, our
sharpened number two pencils hanging uselessly
...

I wake in the night to find you
nestled close to me under the quilt,
your tiny hands stroking my breast.
...

After a night out dancing, she unwound
her hair from its bun, letting bobby pins
clatter into a white dish with a rose
hand-painted in the center. The dish
...

The kite was a free gift
from the insurance company:
a flimsy plastic cut-out of Snoopy
with a complicated network of strings
...

While unpacking, I find your jacket, bent
into an unnatural shape in a carton full
of books. The fabric is worn, one pocket
pulled apart at the seam. This is evidence,
...

While you’re in the restroom
I eat your potato
and let the waitress take
your plate, remembering
...

They tumble into the library, the mother
and her little girl, both laughing,
covering their mouths. Their cheeks
are flushed, they have been running,
...

The green couch, its pale arm peeled back
to reveal cardboard and staples, leaks
clumps of stuffing across the grass.
...

You go back to New Mexico and find it softened; in your absence,
it has become beautiful. The mountains slope, rust-red and tan,
a knobbled mixture of dirt and rock dotted with scrubby green bushes.
The road winds past a wall of mountain on one side, a steep ravine
...

15.

I am undressing right now,
in front of you. It’s not
a sexual act, but an act
of devotion. Look: you can see me.
...

Immediately, the landscape is wrong,
all shades of brown, and you are sheepish,
sure that you must have missed a sign
...

I know just where to find her, standing at the stove,
frying potato latkes in a cast-iron skillet. Her apron
is spattered with dark spots of grease, and waves
of heat rise up from the stove, pasting her dark hair
...

18.

One has to question the logic of a swing set
embedded in a slab of asphalt
on the playground of an elementary school.
...

Everywhere I lay my hands
I hear music. Each touch
on the computer keyboard,
...

We return at nightfall, shoulders bowed, weighed down
by slights and insults. They fall from us at the door,

as everything beyond these walls recedes. The horns
...

Leah Browning Biography

Leah Browning's fiction, poetry, essays, and articles have appeared in a variety of publications including Queen's Quarterly, Tipton Poetry Journal, The Saint Ann’s Review, Literary Mama, 42opus, Blood Orange Review, Boston Literary Magazine, Autumn Sky Poetry, Brink Magazine, and several anthologies. Browning is a native of New Mexico. Her website can be found at www.leahbrowning.com.)

The Best Poem Of Leah Browning

The Patchwork Poem

Skin scrubbed clean and glowing
after a shower, the scent of shampoo.

Lying in bed on a winter morning
with the baby asleep between us.

Our fingers pressed together
in the dark of a movie theater.

The sound of laughter. Always,
the sound of laughter.

Walking downtown
and back home again.

Night by the river.
What you said, what I said.

I’ll bind these things together,
trim the loose threads, work until

the separate pieces
form one piece—skin-soft,

yet durable, too, because
I mean it to last you forever.

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