- A Brief History of Fiction
If I get the story right my mother’s empty bottles
will melt back into sand — just enough for a shoreline
the size of our driveway. We could hold our shoes
by their heels without talking. In this version, I know
the password to leaven the latch of fingers
wrapped around aluminum cans. I hold a compact mirror
up to her nose to see the fog of the living. If I get the story
right, a fog will settle over the shore and there
will be no other place to look but at each other. [End Page 1]
Keith Leonard is an MFA candidate at Indiana University. He is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets prize and a finalist for the Washington Square poetry prize, and his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Best New Poets, DIAGRAM, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Journal, Laurel Review, Meridian, and Toad.