- 6 days ago
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Updated: 5 days ago
About the Work: Anna Leonard
In our “About the Work” series, Olga Mexina asks recent contributors for insight into their writing or for current sources of inspiration. Read Anna Leonard's work in SER Vol. 43.2.
“I don't know how an overdose works”
My brother was an addict, but more importantly, he was my brother. A brother who fed me potato chips and butter sandwiches when our mother wasn’t home. A brother who taught me to skateboard too young. A brother who let me steal his herbs just to keep smelling their fragrances.
He overdosed in a motel room in 2018, and before abandoning his body (likely out of fear of jail time despite the new and necessary Good Samaritan laws), his friends tucked him into bed. My mother identified him from a photo, and luckily, he looked like he was sleeping.
“I don’t know how an overdose works” and another poem of the same title forthcoming in Frontier Poetry are poems about omission, evasion, and the persistent curiosity that fights against those concepts. I am a lover of learning, but there is so much I wish I could forget.
I read Mark Bibbins’ book-length elegy, Thirteenth Balloon, about a week before writing this piece. His use of caesura and lack of punctuation spoke to the openness of grief itself—how we process death in jolting fragments. In my poetry, I now feel overly dependent on caesura and under dependent on punctuation. It’s all Mark’s fault.
I’ll finish on his words because they speak so powerfully to my experience as an elegiac writer: “For me elegy / is a Ouija planchette / something I pretend not to touch / as I push it around trying / to make it say / what I want it to say.”
ANNA LEONARD is a poet and musician pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is the Lead Media and Podcast Editor for Blackbird as well as a reader for Yellow Arrow Publishing. Her poems can be read in Emerge Literary Journal, Anti-Heroin Chic, Eunoia Review, and elsewhere. She has songs available to stream on all streaming platforms.