Two Poems by Leslie McGrath

Two Poems by Leslie McGrath

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Agnostic

She with
her sac
of eggs
strung between
curved wall
& clapper
doesn’t know
her world’s
a bell.

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Estrangement

Ripped
at the seams

the garment
laid out
for viewing

is a garment no longer

Child from mother
from sister from brother

Each an ostracism
ultimately
of the self

No punishment’s
more intimate
than this

in which
she who suffers most
the absence, loses.

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Leslie McGrath is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Opulent Hunger, Opulent Rage (2009) and Out from the Pleiades (2014), and two chapbooks. McGrath’s third collection, Feminists Are Passing from Our Lives, will be published in April 2018 by The Word Works. Winner of the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry (2004), she has been awarded residencies at Hedgebrook and the Vermont Studio Center, as well as funding from the CT Commission on the Arts and the Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation. Her poems and interviews have been published widely, including in Agni, Poetry magazine, The Academy of American Poets, The Writer’s Chronicle, and The Yale Review. McGrath teaches creative writing at Central CT State University and is series editor of The Tenth Gate, a poetry imprint of The Word Works Press.

Photo credit: Mon Oeil via a Creative Commons license.

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