“Better Your Body” and Works by A. Leal (TW)

Amanda Leal is a 30 year old poet from Lake Worth FL. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in issues of CAROUSEL, Tampa Review, Twyckenham Notes, and many others.

Content advisory: “The Shooter” contains themes of gun violence.

BUTTERCUP

Laying in bed, you hold me from behind,
rubbing circles in my palm, straightening
my fingers, your other hand in my hair,
cradling my head, my mind in your fingers
like the petals of a cabbage. We nest
in one another after sex, the hook
of your knees to the keel of my thighs,
the weight of your arm on my ribs, our bodies
doubled in each other like pinecone scales.
I think of how this is nothing
of lust, the way you hold me
without motive, our bodies loose, settled
as silt gathers on a buttercup.
We are not the grind of the Universe
in this moment, the skirts of a Kissimmee
forest, terraces of pines blazing in a golden
hour. Our bodies give to one another
like liquid, we are the Suwannee River
at dawn, fog lifting from the surface
of the water the way we breathe
in synchronicity, our stillness hung over
our figures like a fugue of mist,
the sapphire hips of the river
at our feet, the columns of your ankles
now pressed to my heels,
the ocean of your breath in my ear.

WANDERERS

It is minutes after the storm and I’m thinking
of you, our lawn chair sparkling in rain
like fragments of glass, the yellow light glowing
in my terracotta pots, droplets clinging to the palm fronds,
hanging like hands swinging at the sides
of the trunks. The light shifts from golden to rose
on the trunk of the Christmas palm,
and I think of how the tree symbolizes everything we hate
about Florida, but the steadiness we find in one another,
even last night, after Pizza Rustica, as we cruised on I-95,
the concrete hexagons of the wall blushing
in the sunset. You know me to get lost in myself,
mouthing the dialogue of a memory as I study the rainbow
bladed across the windshield, but this time I discovered you
posturing, your arm flexed on the steering wheel
as though gripping someone’s arm, your lips parted with thought.
The lenses of your Ray Bans held pools of salmon,
your beard seeming to garner electricity as the amber light
bent forward on the dashboard, and I started laughing
as you startled back to reality, the uncertainty
as your daydream eroded. You mumbled, Look at this sky,
but I was not embarrassed of you, the way you shifted
positions in the car, straightening as though caught in the act
of touching yourself, someone who can wander the forest
within themselves just as I can, the sound barrier rising
and receding alongside the car like brain waves
cresting and falling, your arms relaxing as you find my hand,
and remember the way back home.

THE SHOOTER

They found her on the second floor,
the bay windows shaped like the bow of a boat,
hickory mountains the colors of coins
behind her, as she buckled in her tactical gear,
camouflage pants and Vans with flames,
collapsing like a stack of books to the ground.
As they rushed her body, the gun
still in her hand that opened like a white shell,
I thought of her as a student, cross-legged in the cell
of sunshine falling from those windows,
a library book on her thighs. I wondered if she knew
even then as she spoke, the light touching her lips
like any other, that she would surrender
her breath to the serrated cusp of the mountains,
split open the way each mother that day lost their child —
the pink scrambled image of a nine year old
on the body camera, the police stepping over
her corpse — or the bright white torso,
illuminated in the sunlight, her throat
already filling with soil. Now, nothing matters
of her life besides the spread of her body
in the vault of light, an entire nation
watching to ensure she stays dead,
her cap falling off like a scalp, to spill
rings of hair that her mother will never
unravel again, the assault rifle at her fingertips,
the rods of a skeletal extension.

From the Editor:

We hope that readers receive In Parentheses as a medium through which the evolution of human thought can be appreciated, nurtured and precipitated. It will present a dynamo of artistic expression, journalism, informal analysis of our daily world, entertainment of ideas considered lofty and criticism of today’s popular culture. The featured content does not follow any specific ideology except for that of intellectual expansion of the masses.

Founded in late 2011, In Parentheses prides itself upon analysis of the current condition of intelligence in the minds of these young people, and building a hypothesis for one looming question: what comes after Post-Modernism?

The idea for this magazine stems from a simple conversation regarding the aforementioned question, which drew out the need to identify our generation’s place in literary history.

To view the types of work we typically publish, preview or purchase our past issues.

Please join our community on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram at @inparenth.