Sugar
Through the hole in our fence
my daughter slips a note
to a boy with buzzed hair
and scabby elbows, the son
of a neighbor I have not met
and, knowing me, never will.
While he reads, she kneels
in the slatted patch of shade,
plucking a blade of grass,
brushing it against her lip.
Who was it who said childhood
is just sugar slowly melting?
They do this for an hour—
the passing and the happiness
and the grass on the lips.
They never speak to one another.
They never once look through the hole
to see the other’s face.
Testimony
When the kid from Memphis
who would later get expelled
for whittling bar soap into a shiv
and stabbing the school librarian
asked me if I wanted to see something cool,
I did not in fact want to see something cool.
From him (possibly from everyone)
I wanted the opposite: to be left alone
in the field of crabgrass and clay
that gathered itself like a bruise
at the edge of our playground.
I wanted to spend recess discovering
a new kind of bug, or making words
in the dirt with cracked sticks and gravel.
I wanted to spend it rehearsing what lies
I would tell my mother during dinner
when she asked about the best part of my day.
Transportation—that was something cool.
Instead I got a kid from Memphis,
who removed a blue tip match from his pocket,
said, Bet your dumb ass can’t do this,
and struck it against his front tooth,
which jutted awkwardly out from his gums,
all crooked and too-big and gray,
a cheap tombstone askew in its plot.
You know exactly how cool this trick was.
Yet, if you have survived an American childhood,
you also know history takes the shape you give it.
Ask me, then, about the best part of my day,
and I will tell you about the fire between us.
How it hissed and then sputtered, dancing
like a hermit in the dark cave of his cupped hand.
Say we watched it die together.
Say after it did, he had a pocket full of matches.
Dan Leach has published poems in The Southern Review, The Massachusetts Review, and The Sun. He is the recipient of Texas Review Press’s Southern Poetry Breakthrough Award, and his collection Stray Latitudes was released in 2024. He lives on the coast of South Carolina, where he teaches writing at Charleston Southern University.
