2 Poems | Leah Scott

Second Noon Bloom

Today I steeped in white tea. A black ceramic mug,
infant dregs condensed in mesh hung over the rim.
Sucked dark cocoa chili peel orange zest
til it cloaked my tongue and my teeth.
Poured boiling water through a plastic cone, brown
paper-filtered Peruvian countryside coffee-pluck
all thick-froth beneath the kettle heat.
Kneaded my navel and hips with oaky knuckles.
Counted sixty-four ounces of tap-water and swallowed
with it three antidote tablets. My abdomen swelled
and stayed swollen, muscles stretching spasmodic
along ribs and spine, and there I rested my palm.

When naked footsoles met cold tile, thighs
pressed to porcelain, a pomegranate
seed fell to the floor like a gem
from between my legs.

Eve

The sun, life-jewel, the moon
at her most hookish
a shard of shaven light

carved, scraped from his surface
discarded to the night
dark as a workshop floor.

Axis refractions grow her
round while the shadow-rug
is searched: she bloats

herself whole in the lens
of a magnifying glass.
The jeweler plucks dust

from space, sweeps
it into shapes. One pearl
forms of grit and particulate

in the black of a clam’s mouth
and then the jeweler
sets it in a ring

and her vision will fracture
over again, like clipped
nails or a rib.

— — — — — —
Leah Scott writes poems because she has never given much thought to doing anything else. A graduate from the University of Denver with a BA in Creative Writing and Spanish, she mixes magic elixirs at the local tea shop and peddles books to earn a living. When she is doing neither of those things, you will likely find her frolicking in the Rocky Mountains, riding her bicycle, reading, or imbibing various beverages. Her poetry manuscript With Scissors & a Tiny Saw won the DU Departmental Mary Cass Award in 2015. She enjoys being alive and awake, though she’d usually rather be dreaming.