A Sunday series from RVA Magazine featuring writers from Richmond and Virginia
Writer’s Block is RVA Magazine’s Sunday series highlighting contemporary writers working in Richmond and across the Commonwealth. Each week, we feature original poems, short stories, or essays. Just real voices writing right now.
This week, we’re featuring four poems by Anna Leonard, a Virginia poet whose work treads the line between reverence and rupture. Her writing holds close the intimacy of grief, memory, and the body but never smooths over their edges. Whether honoring the soft pulse of a moth’s wing or recalling a brother’s voice in a dream, Leonard writes with precision and tenderness.
If you’d like to be featured, send your work to hello@rvamag.com with the subject line “Writer’s Block.”
Ode to Death
The sky holds a full white ghost
tonight. The gift of morning
will come as dewy birdsong
from the back porch. Absence, though,
remains. In dark and in waking,
I count my longings and what turns up
is a finite number. All the years since
my mother’s passing, since my brother’s:
the older I become, they just stand further away.
Without you, Death, the precious hour
would be lost on me. Would love, its flourishing
misery, stand a chance? Would my skin know
the difference between touch and
caress? Or merely carry my body
in and out of rooms. O obvious whisper,
your frightening call plays on repeat.
Your devastation, my arousal.
This disappearing act: all I manage
to envision when I try to make love,
your inky texture superimposed
upon sweat. But would I race
to undress if not for your burden?
Would our thrills be made so usual?
Translator of flesh, I thank you
for your worst. For everything
is now possible. What I stand to lose
is monstrous. But what I stand to gain
in your hands: inevitable heartache,
freedom, the recklessness of joy.
Where We Went on Accident
The day I met the sea unbridled,
standing on the jagged shore,
eye to eye with the end of the world,
snails flocked on the marble rocks,
clinging to current remains, so I blessed them
and left, sunshine leaking through birch and pine
into the car carrying us through Maine.
I had been gathering want in sound,
but here, a forgiving quiet took flight,
unaware of my pen, its searching.
We drove where the roads began
to fall off themselves and into
the forest, part of some whole
now sliding away to die with another.
I was a passenger, too, through this,
being driven to touch the Earth
by someone and something else, but
when they checked our passes and waved us
through to the sky, there was a reflex
in my body, tucked in the deep dark of the car,
to also lift my hand, to also say thanks.
August Ended
quietly, as if change blooms
in the dark, an evening primrose:
its soft, swift becoming. Pollinators
flock to sunshined petal-beacons
in hopes of lasting, our lasting
tethered to their persistence.
And you, the primrose moth:
your soft cream belly, pink-lit mouth—
you rest in its middle, secretly
humbling this gold chalice,
keeping shade as a friend
on bright days—you are just
being what you are, and I am here
memorializing your rest and
in doing so, hoping, too, for
metamorphosis: flamingo, fluttering.
O, to become the Earth. O, to grow,
to house awe in my belly.
I bow my brow to you,
sweet suckling of night,
to beg: take me, take me
with you to softer light
when you emerge.
In the Dream, My Brother Serenades Me
The top-heavy washroom middles in the air.
He arrives at my side: warm, in motion.
Hands dirtying strings in the toasted light,
his voice swims in the tub
as I lather the white spotted dog
tattooed on his chest.
Everyone is in the den. I hear them
over his strumming. He was never a singer,
but he sings to me, warbles
his dream-song, and I know
later I will forget this.
I am grateful.
This is the mind’s effort
to make sense of memory, its barbs:
how he once sang to me
in our mother’s room,
his poor voice rippling, his hands
liable in that pooling music.
I don’t remember the song,
but his voice, its acquiescence—
If I could remove from my mind
one memory, it might be this one:
his loving eyes, his tenderness
just before he turned out the light.
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