Courtney Leblanc

 ARE ALL THE LOVERS IN YOUR POEMS REAL

~ after Shannon Wolf, after Aimee Nezhukumatathil

If by real you mean real as a cool
breeze kissing your skin and raising
goosebumps along your arms, then yes,
every touch, every tender word, every
glance is real. Wait. They’re not exactly
real because they don’t exist in real
time but instead are held in separate
chambers in my heart because I love
them all simultaneously—each lover
a part of me. One saying, good morning
beautiful while another hands me a cup
of coffee and another washes the dishes
from last night’s dinner party. Can you
imagine how many bouquets
of ranunculus I’d receive each January?
Each aware of my favorite flower, each
wanting my birthday smile bestowed
upon them, and every single one
of them wonders who I love best.

BLESSING FOR THE GIRLS WITH EATING DISORDERS

because I know what it’s like to make lists of food
you’ll never allow yourself to eat, to let your fingers
trip through a cookbook, using Post-Its to mark
recipes you’ll never make. Bless the girls who see
a buffet as the most deliciously terrifying thing,
whose friends marvel at her getting seconds
and thirds, without knowing she’ll kneel before
the toilet and without a sound, bring everything
back up—the eating reversed until the very first
thing she swallowed brushes past her teeth and
kisses her lips as it leaves. Bless the girls who log
every morsel they eat, who know the calorie}
count of every meal, who track their workouts
and calories and go to sleep with the dull ache
of hunger in their bellies. Bless the ones who break
the cycle and the ones who don’t. Bless the girls
who see themselves in this poem. Bless the girl
writing it, for the words reflecting in her eyes
and feeling like home.

I Don’t Eat After 8pm

I once read you shouldn’t
eat after 8pm if you want to lose
weight and I, a woman who hated
her body for a decade, always wanted
less to hate. The week my dad died
I ate my mother’s Pretzel Dessert
with a spoon, the pan held beneath
my chin like a trough, the salty-sweet
combination filling my belly with
calories I couldn’t begin to count.
I ran seven miles each morning,
the flat stretching before me unbroken.
My father lay quiet, first in the hospital, then
in the living room, no longer consuming
anything, his small frame dark against
the pale sheet. When I came inside,
sweat slick and panting, I kissed his
face, told him about my run, the flowers
blooming in the ditch, the blue sheet
of sky. That night, after my mother
had finally gone to bed, I sat
on the chair I’d pulled to my father’s
bedside, ate a cloud of carbs,
the homemade bread my mother
baked and I grew up on. I slathered
on a layer of butter, licked the melted
gold from my fingertips, told him,
in between bites, that I loved him.

Ode to Octopus

Because you can squeeze into (and out of) small
spaces, you’ve never been worried about your size.
You happily devour fish and mussels and crabs,
food held in your many arms, never afraid
you are too much. Your hearts pump blue blood
to each appendage as you reach into rocks
and coral, pulling the white flesh from a conch
shell, searching for your next snack. Oh, how I long
to be that carefree, to hold bread in one hand
and chocolate in the other. To fill my belly
and fulfill my desires without thinking of the scale
tucked into the corner. You, with suckers
lining your arms like bangles, are not afraid
to take up space, to hold onto what you want.
How I wish to emulate you, to stake my claim
at the buffet, to not think twice about wanting.

The Plains Speak Grief
  

It’s easy to get lost here—with nothing
but wide open a person can wander
for weeks without finding shelter.
Men have plowed and planted, hoed
and harvested, been nurtured
and broken by this land—it’s not always
my fault but if a farmer doesn’t learn
grief early he’ll never make it. But
the other side of grief is love and I’ve
got that in spades too. I’ll bless that
4am wake-up with a fuchsia sunrise.
I’ll give that late night chore a blanket
of stars pulled tight across the sky.
And long after that farmer has sold
his tractor and held the last shafts
of wheat between his fingers, I’ll give
him a soft breeze against his sun-darkened
skin. I’ll stretch cerulean like a quilt
across a summer sky. And during
the last week of his life, when
his daughter can’t sleep and he’s
clutching at breath from the hospital
bed, I’ll give her the most brilliant
sunrise she’s ever seen. I’ll paint the sky
magenta and violet, I’ll show her
the brutal beauty of grief, I’ll let her tears
water the thistle that grows wild
in the ditches, and she’ll know I’ll hold
him in the earth of my hands and he’ll
be home.

When My Therapist Asks How I’m Doing

I talk about the election, my father’s death, my friend’s
brain tumor. I don’t tell her about my two and a half
hour workout that morning, how I wouldn’t stop until
I burned 1,000 calories. I don’t tell her of my daily
ritual of stripping down, exhaling every ounce of breath
before stepping onto the scale. How if I have a hair tie
around my wrist it must be removed and the ritual
repeated. I don’t tell her I know the calories of my
morning coffee (102) or my yogurt and granola (199)
or how I fear growing into my mother’s body.
I spent a decade eating nothing more than an apple
and two rice cakes between the hours of 8 and 4.
When I gave up that slow march toward a hungry
death I thought I’d be normal. But what is normal
if not tracking every bite of broccoli? If not knowing
the calories in a single baby carrot (4). I don’t tell
my therapist this because I like when my clavicles arch
out from my chest, when my hip bones jut forward
like handlebars. I don’t tell her because I don’t
want to talk about what ended fifteen years ago,
even if its fingerprints remain etched permanently
on me. Instead I talk about the daily hikes with my dog,
my friend’s chemo regiment, the new meditation app
I downloaded. The session ends and I scoop up the
rumpled Kleenex and drop them in the garbage. There’s
a bowl of leftover Halloween candy near the exit. I dig
for a Snickers, pop the bite-size chocolate into my mouth
and make it last until I reach my car. This time I don’t
record it. This time, I regret not taking two.

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