Poems by LeeAnn Olivier

They Ask Why You Don’t Leave

Because your lungs are heavy as deadwood

and your eyelids wax and wane, words caught 

in your teeth like a dark art, a snake plant, 

your tongue a huddle of feathers. Because 

with the monster collared, you sleep 

the sleep of the dreamless, a triquetra of wolves 

curled around your shins. But monsters have a way 

of shifting shapes and crawling in. This time 

he carries a hooked blade, the tips of his tree 

fingers flamed into kindling. Because you follow, 

hollow as a vertebrate’s husk, his horseflies hemming 

you in, their static a wild cackle. Because you carve 

and cleave through gnarled weeds, a claw-footed 

tub upturned at the cusp of the forest, Orion’s lullaby 

a tendril seeping life into your sleeping veins, 

your silhouette backlit between the birch skeins, 

your heart a red thread spooling. Because you’ll 

outlive this wintering. And holy folk will sing 

over the bones while the cold sea swallows 

everything wave after wave after wave.

Bright Star

When the anesthesia wanes I claw through cuffed 
wrists, my glutted throat a moat of gravel, tubes 
sprawling from my veins like the roots of a black 
gum tree until I’m pulled back under, and I take a night 
train to a half-world half a world away, a serenade 
of cyanide on the bedside, a red star carved at the edge 
of the Black Sea. The whittled rattle of spokes on tracks, 
maps and gestures little reliquaries, a stranger’s mouth 
on mine, an utter hush washed over us as the lacquered 
leaves of her eyes gleam greengold and my pulse rustles 
like a hiss of waves. I’m dreaming my liver donor’s 
dreams. What lags behind flickers and hums. Bright star: 
his mythologies nestled deep as a swell of bees in my ribs.

Originally from Louisiana, LeeAnn Olivier is a neurodivergent Cajun poet and community-college professor living in Fort Worth, Texas. In the past five years, she has survived domestic violence, breast cancer, and most recently, an emergency liver transplant. Her poetry explores the power of nature, music, mythology, and fairy tales to help the brain and body heal from trauma.