Maverick Poet Award Finalist: “That the Scar Becomes a Scar” by Denise Michele Leto

That the Scar Becomes a Scar

Failed beauty having to do with us.

Hooks tangled in fish gore.

Scavengers of image.

We make them into words.

Menaced rebar near our bodies

baring.

Feet trapped in the machinery of

elsewhere.

We leave skinless: a bouquet of

bones.

Twin Peaks and Hunter’s Point by

the shorn Bay.

The sense of a map caught in

frightened mollusk.

Clamoring, screeching sea gulls.

We love them but it hurts in ways we

can’t explain.

Beauty having nothing to do with us.

Welcome to the decaying wooden

bridge.

How it rounds back onto itself and

can no longer carry sound.

It smells of urine and the fog slaps.

Plump, languid pigeons gather

grooming in an enclave.

The illusion of a circular cove.

Then, mossy skulls in a dormant

shallow.

A threatening, orange sign staked in

front of the fort says:

“Danger.” “Poison.” “Unsafe to

enter.”

We enter.

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MAVERICK POET AWARD FINALIST “That the Scar Becomes a Scar”.

Denise Leto is a multidisciplinary poet, writer and dance dramaturge. Her current project, home (Body), which explores natural and built environments is a collaborative poetry/dance/video installation and performance at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History. With the poet Pat Reed she co-created: The San Francisco Baylands Eco-Poetry Project: Aimless Wandering with Instructions. Work has appeared most recently in Orion, Jacket2, Baest, About Place: Practices of Hope, Rogue Agent, and Mollyhouse. Poems are forthcoming in Quarterly West and the Southern Illinois University Press. She is the author of the poetry book for the dance/sound art/performance, Your Body is Not a Shark. Her poem, The Sad Beaded Lady appeared on the broadside, Starving Death with the Woodland Pattern Book Center. She does cross-genre, disability culture work with the international art collective, Olimpias. She recently completed her poetry manuscript The Body is a Wild Summons.