Title: Take Something When You Go
Genre: Poetry
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Synopsis:
Navigating the open highways of our life decisions, Take
Something When You Go shows us how to let go while still holding on to
love, memory, family, and friends. We can learn to identify our many beginnings
and endings, and come to terms with loss and renewal. And while it’s always
okay to acknowledge what’s in the rear-view, we must constantly strive to move
the odometer forward.
Accolades For 'Take Something When You Go'
—Neil Shepard, author of Hominid Up and Vermont
Exit Ramps II
“Take Something When You Go by Dawn Leas is powerful in what
it says and what it whispers… “a wish, or a prayer. / Almost a dream. Almost
real. Always moving, toward and away.” Her poems reveal the “View from Canyon
Lake Overview at the Top of Superstition Mountains,” the eye of Hurricane
Sandy, the mystery of imaginary numbers. They travel through time, through
different stages of the body, and lead to powerful healings. Pay attention to
the light as “The Morning Wakes Up”… “We circle Sugar Magnolia / twice with the
emerging sun, / breathe in the silence.” Her language transmits music, image,
body presence, emotion, and spiritual awakening. This book is a joy to read.”
—Diane Frank, author of Swan Light, and Yoga of
the Impossible, and editor of River of Earth and Sky: Poems for the
Twenty-First Century
Empty Cars
You walk into the kitchen,
shaking the February cold
from your coat,
flecks of snow melt in your hair.
I stir a pot of sauce, its steam carries past Sunday
dinners at my parents’, kids playing Go Fish
in the family room. You lean against the island
and cross your arms. I’m slicing cloves of garlic
when you say that empty cars, dark and idle,
in the driveway, make you sad sometimes.
I stop chopping and for the first time since the boys left,
I see you, really know you. I no longer question
what keeps a marriage together through years of northern
winters, no sun, only grey clouds, slick ice,
what moves people past the
fringe into longing again.
Kith
The party always began in the back yard—
coolers
filled with ice, beer and soda,
burgers
spitting into lighter fluid and charcoal.
A circle of lawn chairs with frayed webbing
held aunts
in bell bottoms and halter tops,
their
gossip only interrupted to yell at children
running with sparklers in hand. Inside the Victorian,
grandfather
sat for hours at an old upright
against the
back wall of dining room, a line
of Budweiser cans sweat circles into the wood's grain.
Playing by
ear, he ran through his song list
always
ending with “Danny Boy” or “When Irish
Eyes are Smiling” just as the marathon game of Jeopardy
fired up
around the mahogny table, siblings
and spouses
divided into teams with red, green, and yellow
clickers in one hand, Coors Light and Camels in the other.
As the game
entered its third hour, arguments rose
over Potent
Potables and who forgot to shout
their answers in form of a question. The kids were a
patchwork den carpet
using each
other as pillows, the youngest in charge
of cranking
the volume on the console to make
Gilda Radnor's laugh win over dining-room noise. Cigarette
smoke
coiled through the first floor, hung above the kids
for just a
second before escaping through open windows
dissolving into the dark back yard while mosquitoes
skittered
against dusty screens, always
a frenetic dance
toward unreachable light.
About the Author
Dawn Leas is the author of
a full-length collection, Take Something
When You Go, (Winter Goose Publishing 2016), and a chapbook, I Know When to Keep Quiet, (Finishing
Line Press, 2010). Her work has appeared in Literary
Mama, Southern Women's Review, San Pedro River Review, The Pedestal Magazine and
elsewhere. Her work won an honorable mention in the 2005 Dorothy Sargent
Rosenberg Poetry Prize and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In past
lives she has been a copywriter, freelancer, English teacher, higher-education
administrator, and stay-at-home mom. Currently, she is an independent writer,
editor, and writing coach. For more information, visit www.dawnleas.com.
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