This Space for Message: Poems by Diane LeBlanc. Number 3.04 in the Seven Kitchens Press Editor’s Series.

Cover art: “Blue I Love You” by Guillermo F Castro.

Release date: August 23, 2017 [100 copies]
25 pages
$9.00

Diane LeBlanc is a writer, teacher, and book artist. She is the author of three poetry chapbooks: Sudden Geography (2014), Dancer with Good Sow (2008), and Hope in Zone Four (1998). Poems and essays appear in Bellingham Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Journal, Mid-American Review, Natural Bridge, and other journals. Diane directs the writing program and teaches at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. Visit her website here. 

Lonely

Some men are born lonely. 
They are lonely for water  
when ranch hands pull them 
into a landlocked family. 
No amount of milk will do. 
They will always long for rain. 

They aren’t born cowboys 
if they forgive a sheep 
who wanders off to be alone, 
who catches its foot in a snow fence 
and dies in the torn tent  
of sagging orange web.

The lonely men I know are good 
with nails and lettuce seeds, things 
defining a need for depth. 
They grieve for their mothers, 
for dogs and the marriages 
they never learned to bury.

They live like trees 
beside their fathers’ wooden houses. 
They fall in love with hips 
of vine carved in armoire doors.  
They wonder why they see 
in those curves their undoing. 

• Purchase This Space for Message here or send an e-mail query to sevenkitchenspress at gmail dot com.
• Click here to read about Diane’s full-length collection, The Feast Delayed, forthcoming from Terrapin Books.