HOLD

“The poems in Victoria LeBlanc’s debut collection, Hold, are of exquisite, stunning beauty. Eulogy and grief poems for her mother that transcend the personal shared as art.”

Ilona Martonfi, author of four poetry books, most recent: The Tempest (Inanna, 2020) These poems were composed while simultaneously working on a series of portrait sketches that explore the same theme and arc of time: the slow decline and loss of a mother. (See Hold)

Selected Poems

As if

In the narrow lane

a sparrow flutters its injured wing

in its lair an animal paws a way

to earth’s

ten thousand things

in a bed in a room down a corridor

you flail the humid air

as if to claw

an invisible hieroglyphic

bone thin your fingers roam your face as

the blind roam

to know

dry lips hollow cheek eyelid

ridged brow

final text of the palpable life

a woman touching with fingered limbs

as if to say

“like that”

bird of omen end of day knot moon

bone

Silt

On my knees on the studio floor I cannot find

umber grey green of river light

sheen of mud film slick sinuous reeds

silt in my throat

archive: unmoving gaze outside her window

spilled echoes on an old cloth she turns reaches

for my hand

driftwood small rocks you slip into your pocket

swallows overhead that line about her being offered up rough bark rain drenched the colour you cannot name

beauty is a call

Don’t say I come from nowhere

I dwell inside a word inside a womb word

I dwell inside Sappho’s words

sweet mother I cannot work the loom

then a stanza is dropped

a woman at a loom trying to weave

what’s missing

guttural sounds pushing up memories

in exile rupture

in the sanctuary grounds

face to the black earth

to the sky

don’t say I come from nowhere.

HOLD

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