PROSE POETRY
DIANE LEBLANC
DEAR MILKWEED
I come for ruin. For silk and seed matted on one lip of your open pod. I hover near you in prairie grass to find the faintest remnant of creation, a slipped brushstroke, a spot of glue. Were you the one who told me blue dragonflies are gone until summer? Birds, too, absent in this caesura before winter. I work hard not to fill silence with synonyms of broken. A mile from here, frost traces deer prints in mud, stitches an oak leaf with white, says light. Says look for seams, not tears. Even the seeds caught on your stems seem to understand the pull between fullness and letting go. I don’t mean to doubt. But the curve dividing sun and shadow in your empty pod moves as I move. I forget if I’m myth or method among prairie facts.
Diane LeBlanc is a writer, teacher, and book artist with roots in Vermont, Wyoming, and Minnesota. She is the author of The Feast Delayed (2021) and four poetry chapbooks. Poems and essays appear in Bellevue Literary Review, Cimarron Review, Mid-American Review, Ploughshares, and Southern Humanities Review, among others. Diane is a professor and writer in residence at St. Olaf College. Read more at www.dianeleblancwriter.com .
