This selection, chosen by Guest Editor t.r. san, is from Dressing the Bear by Susan L. Leary (Trio House Press 2024).
We’ll Take the Riddle, So Long as It Remains Unanswered
Sometimes the blue is so blue it is every shade of blue at once. The
first sound, the back & forth of the blue water. A pair of scissors is
blue as is the hem of the blue hand that holds them. The first urge, to
snip the blue heron from a swath of nocturnal shoreline. Discernment
risks injury, so we sleep inside the blueish swirls of our own blueish
bodies, mistake the brute flap of a wing for touch, suffering for the
brief amnesia of stars. Distant or beloved, a man’s cigar smoke is blue,
a vast graffiti of legs stretched into the blue of a borrowed beach chaise,
the marooned bones fooled into a comfortable shipwreck, the lungs
into ether or sea. A ghost can whet the blade & sit inside the blue
of a palm without our knowing. What comes is the world before it’d
begun, before the blue was anything other than blue.
Susan L. Leary (she/her) is the author of SENTENCE (Nine Syllables Press, fall 2026), selected by Eugenia Leigh as the winner of the Nine Syllables Press Chapbook Contest; More Flowers (Trio House Press, February 2026); and Dressing the Bear (Trio House Press, 2024), selected by Kimberly Blaeser as the winner of the Louise Bogan Award. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in such places as Indiana Review, North American Review, Third Coast, Cream City Review, Smartish Pace, The Arkansas International, and Verse Daily. She holds an MFA from the University of Miami and lives in Indianapolis, IN.
t.r. san is a poet and translator currently based on Gadigal land, with recent work found in minor literature[s], The Cincinnati Review, HAD, Smokelong Quarterly, The Offing, &c. read & reach @thoushallkill on Twitter, or trsan.neocities.org.
