Two Poems

I Pretend Sometimes I am in Love

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_4/Leidenthal2.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

Come sit on my couch.
I sit in the middle so our thighs touch
and you will secretly like it. I like to close
the distance before there is distance
like a train that never leaves the destination station.
I don’t like change.
You shouldn’t give pennies to your servers
because they will jingle when they walk around.
My grandma said that. I don’t much like my grandma.
She is always changing.
Her face is melting off her bones
and now she needs a walker and a hearing aid.
She is dying. One thing is certain:
I want to die before my husband dies.
I don’t have a husband yet, but if I did, I’d want to die before him.
I am sensitive and once I have lost my loneliness
I don’t want to find it again. I want to be
arriving in the middle. There are women
with bangs, singing to acoustic guitars.
I am their best-loved chord.
I am the strap around your back.

I Got Drunk and Went Bowling

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_4/Leidenthal1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

The morning after there were bruises
and texts that read, “Holy hot, Wyoming.
I didn’t know you had it in you.”
In reference to being pushed up against a wall
in the men’s room at Houston’s Bar and Grill,
I am unapologetic.
I left the twins in the backseat of the car
with the windows cracked. They have each other.
I remember decorating the Christmas tree
when I was young and Dad drinking in the kitchen.
My Mom shoved a pair of underwear in her purse
and left for the night. Andrew cried over the garlands.
I read somewhere
Earth gets 100 tons heavier every day because of falling space dust.
I wonder if there is a limit to the weight gravity can hold
and why the Earth isn’t covered in space dust
and what space dust looks like
and if this universe isn’t just a snow globe
that is always being shaken when its space dust starts to settle.
Where you grabbed my arm to hoist me up to straddle you
that’s this bruise here.