Anna Leah
Feels Like Nineteen
Shivering, stamping, she stood.
She ran.
Not to escape the dawn,
dreading to extend the night.
“There’s nowhere else,” he called.
“Come back.”
“Just to keep the wolf away,” she replied,
“The weather says it feels like nineteen.”
The edge of a new year, 2018,
spoken to by a man too loud.
When her ersatz lover spoke,
her skin shut down
like pipes beginning to freeze that morning.
He was a citadel to himself,
and a stone for her to cling.
The closing year had been buffeted
by winds and change beyond imagine or grip.
Because the world shows its worst earliest.
It makes girls old
and cuts at their aging.
Making penetrable façade of open eyes and reedy thighs,
ripe to the teeth of a lech,
soft under the teeth of a cannibal.
Long ago, her heart had been eaten,
one too many walks
under hawkish gaze of predators that come out at night.
Before this year would change,
she had resolved to petrify
so she never would.
So storms of sodium could swirl around,
she would steel under grit and old tears,
salt and hormonal debris,
shredded naïveté and sore skin
burnt into never feeling again.
This dark morning was cold, she knew,
she ran to want to try to feel.
Rigorous reality
of warm blood piping after chill
moving under blained flesh
He was right, there was nowhere to go,
on that night that felt nineteen
Too long alone, she’d die
and he had plotted all the shelters.
She jumped and stamped and waited on a new year,
with small hope for a warmer time.
Anna Leah’s poetry has appeared in Panel Magazine (published in Budapest). Her broadcast and print journalism have appeared on PBS, AJ+, and Brut and in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The New York Post, Brokelyn, and other publications. She holds a BA from Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass. Also a filmmaker, Leah lives in Brooklyn. She posts poetry to Instagram, @ByAnnaLeah.
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