Two Poems by Naomi Bess Leimsider

 

Madness

 

It is not the good kind, but it’s also not what you think it is. You think. 

Growing without influence in its own environment, it can be quite overstimulated  

and hyperactive. If it flares up again, you might not make it out. Chip away  

at its organic state created from mutations and mistakes and out of control manifestations.  

 

Does it have its own beating heart? 

How will you know? And when you know,  

will there finally be silence and peace 

in the knowing? 

 

When it shows itself, it is coarse-haired, jagged, snaggled. Knotted up on top  

and unseeing. A chipped tooth, one of two, jutting out of the wrong place.  

What a faceless face! This is one of those that grows hair and teeth and maybe  

mirrors the way you will look in the future. Look at it: see your future self.  

 

Will there be more to come?  

It senses you have succumbed, contorted like you are  

in your wild shape. You were so close 

this time. It wants you to know you almost made it out. 

 

 

 

 

Bad Nights

 

I am my own doomsday clock. It’s disruptive when some say I’m a smart girl  

and a smart girl should be able to avoid this level of conflict, of catastrophe,  

at every turn. What I did when I was told what to do; all will be well if only I  

could follow the rules. Now it’s late, and, as usual, I don’t understand the assignment. 

 

And there are things I should have done when I was on the very edge of annihilation,  

waiting for the big threat to pass. It might be after the war, but I am still in the fog  

looking for clear paths. When does my tour end so I can go home, turn it back. After all,  

time is only a way of ticking past. 

 

And if there is ever another morning, I will eat rationed butter pats on baskets of bread,  

big bites of salty powdered eggs, also ersatz cream whipped with replacement oil  

in strong bulletproof coffee. If I still like anything, I like to be under incredible duress,  

then earn my small pleasures – be truly good and hungry – before I fill up to a full belly.  

 

And a smart girl would know better than to exist as a terrible risk to all, I know. I should  

be beyond full-scale plans, situation maps, a serious getting into it, with no reason for  

anyone to panic. Whatever happens now will be a symbol of how I’m never quite sure  

what to examine, how to comprehend the given guidelines, the go ahead, follow directions.  

 

But I’m a smart girl -- so it goes – and there are things I should know. I still keep this  

weapon tucked under my well-worn wings, in the waning minerals of my ribs, where the real danger lives. What I do know is all possible futures have been knocked down to the last:  

we can’t take the world with us when we go. And I just want to take it with me when I go. 

 

 

 

 

Naomi Bess Leimsider’s poetry book, Wild Evolution, was published by Cathexis Northwest Press in June 2023. In addition, she has published poems, flash fiction, and short stories in Mantis, Unleash Lit, Packingtown Review, Tangled Locks Journal, The Avenue Journal, Booth, Anti-Heroin Chic, Wild Roof Journal, Planisphere Quarterly, Little Somethings Press, Syncopation Literary Journal, On the Seawall, St. Katherine Review, Exquisite Pandemic, Orca, Hamilton Stone Review, Rogue Agent Journal, Coffin Bell Journal, Hole in the Head Review, Newtown Literary, Otis Nebula, Quarterly West, The Adirondack Review, Summerset Review, Blood Lotus Journal, Pindeldyboz, 13 Warriors, Slow Trains, Zone 3, Drunkenboat, and The Brooklyn Review. She has been a finalist for the Acacia Fiction Prize, the Saguaro Poetry Prize, and the Tiny Fork Chapbook Contest. In 2022, she received a Pushcart Prize nomination for fiction.