A Florida native and recent transplant to Chicago by way of California, Leah Claire Kaminski has published poems in Bennington Review, FENCE, Prairie Schooner, Vinyl, and ZYZZYVA. A 2018 Artist in Residence at Everglades National Park, she has also received support from the Community of Writers, the Napa Valley Writers Conference, and Ragdale Foundation. She won Grand Prize in the 2017 Summer Literary Seminars Fiction & Poetry Contest and in the 2017 Matrix Magazine LitPOP awards, judged by Eileen Myles. Read some of her work at www.leahclairekaminski.com.
It rushes out and tightens in: as in
a street that paces seamless in a pulse-blue sky:
street itching with new leaf and side-trees reared-back.
As in the slide-hit-slide of drops that flatten
on a car’s metal roof in a lowering
morning and what their hollows hold—what
slides in a curve whose bell starts and ends in
more-blooming rains from more cold-blooded trees.
As in the slump of straw grass over
a hulking compost heap (water-fleshed morning,
bridge bright gray), as in lichen leggy in neon.
Running toward the candling end of each
day, inside, I’m blinking, cataracted, sometimes clear.