STIRRING
Founded in 1999, Stirring is one of the oldest continuously publishing journals on the internet.
Stirring is an electronic quarterly journal.
Founded in 1999, Stirring is one of the oldest continuously publishing journals on the internet.
Stirring is an electronic quarterly journal.
SUSAN L. LEARY
I fail at innovation. I am not me
but the animal inside me: a mosquito
cased in amber, the girl who phones her mother
a little less, then not at all. Belongingness
migrates down the spine with no one
to mind it, no one to decide whether tenderness
is worth the fuss. For too long I’ve been
headless, shame lugged behind me
in my tightly capped skull. I’m not looking
for praise, rather for some glossy truth
spun from my bones into lullaby. With pressure
& warm water, a lid loosens & fire grows
more precise with its flames. Imagine the burnt
leaves, the heaving soil. Imagine holding
the old ball & chain up to your ear
alone in the fields. Unleashed, I am the sound
it makes when it echoes.
Susan L. Leary’s most recent collection, Dressing the Bear, was selected by Kimberly Blaeser to win the 2023 Louise Bogan Award and will be published with Trio House Press in 2024. She is also the author of A Buffet Table Fit for Queens (Small Harbor Publishing, 2023), winner of the Washburn Prize; Contraband Paradise (Main Street Rag, 2021); and This Girl, Your Disciple (Finishing Line Press, 2019), finalist for The Heartland Review Press Chapbook Prize and semi-finalist for the Elyse Wolf Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in such places as Indiana Review, Superstition Review, On The Seawall, The Arkansas International, Crab Creek Review, and Tar River Poetry. Visit her at www.susanlleary.com.
