Layla Lenhardt

Layla Lenhardt Layla Lenhardt Layla Lenhardt
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Layla Lenhardt

Layla Lenhardt Layla Lenhardt Layla Lenhardt
Home
Contact Me
Publications
My Work
About
News
More
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  • Contact Me
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  • My Work
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Selected Poems

The Burning of the Witch

In the mornings, my trepidation is as present 

as dew drops, soft and refracting, like tiny crystal balls.


I’m trying to reconcile the disasters in my mind, 

trying to awaken myself. When we touched honesty 


with our bare hands it was incandescent and you pulled 

yourself away from it like it was a hot stove top, 


you didn’t want to smell the burnt flesh of your palms. 

You didn’t want it to brand you for the rest of your life. 


In the mornings, I still want to touch that flame. I want 

to be marked by it. To feel kinship with the others 


burden by honesty, I’ll open my chest to it. I guess

it’s because I grew up practicing witchcraft. I learned


it from my mother. How she’d stow away trinkets,

cinnamon sticks, and old matchbooks. I grew up 


romancing the moon’s shedding skin and cutting my teeth

on little alchemies, liquids in rocks glasses. 


Now, I’m a grown arsonist. I have a cauldron full 

of your little league baseball cards and chablis


corks. I try to summon with you with incantations,

I sit at my altar, living in salt. In the mornings I try 


to communicate with you through tarot cards 

and 80s songs and Yeats poems posted 


on my instagram. In the morning, I try to tell you

my love is a fire that burns clean. 


Vine Street

Without a second thought 

I sent your Capricorn sun 

to the gallows in exchange 

for limerence and third chances. 

But everyone after you was just

a different iteration of the space

you left behind. Their names on my

phone screen like shallow etchings

on forgotten headstones. 

We could’ve had a place

on Vine Street, and filled it 

with cats, a wedding

beside the willow, a hundred 

more years. Instead I sit shiva

with my feral, adolescent heartache.

I salt my doorways and sheet my mirrors,

and try to remain gentle with myself despite

this inherent vice. 

She said, “Everybody loses 

the thing that made them,”

And I’ve grieved for you for so long,

you feel like folklore. 

Choice

The blood blooms in the bowl. One drop, two

drops at first. In quick succession. And then

a gush. And then it was all over.


Across state lines, you felt a sharp pain, a

pinprick in your chest. For you, it was

all beginning. 

Timid Shame

That winter split me 

like firewood. I was smaller,

splintered, Elliot Smith would play 

on cassette in my blue Volkswagen

while our breath coursed 

through flared nostrils and damaged lungs. 

*

I hid my pain like a sick dog. I slinked

out, under the back deck, 

I swallowed some pills.

In those hideous places 

I can still smell the acrid, peaty heat 

of your breath, reeking like remorse. 

*

But even though you swore that you left 

I still caught you shoplifting.

Greedily, you shoved 

every broken piece of me

into your pockets.

*

The more you took, the more

I couldn’t help but remember you

feeding our cats, their tails licking

around your ankles like muted flames.

And now I’m jealous of people 

I don’t know. I want to be that stranger

sitting across from you on the subway.

I want to claim the dust you leave behind.

Layla Lenhardt

laylalenhardt.poet@gmail.com

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