Poetry by Benjamin Leuty
When they found the alligator in the river,
The kids gathered crabs to feed it
while the elders plotted against it.
And nobody thought to leave it be.
In the days before the gator,
I’d cast myself into the current,
Let my body be a continent
Then a collection of islands
The air between shirt and chest ballooning
And then suddenly,
At the last possible moment,
fleeing in bubbles
Like a flock of birds
I’d sink.
From time to time,
A shoe of mine might bobble
Confused and surfing the ripples on the surface
Like the float that marks your fishing line
And assures you there’s a connection between
hook and line.
I’d climb from the pond,
Sopping wet,
And be a rainstorm
for a second
for just the square foot
beneath my body.
By then it might be dark,
Glass shards making stars of themselves
Under street lamp’s glow
Leafcutter ants still busy
Hauling the trees away
Bit by bit
As if to reconstruct somewhere else
Like Ikea furniture.
Carpenter ants,
Hauling houses away
Chunk by chunk.
In the sand,
A turtle might be dragging itself to sea
Flippers leaving a trail
Like jeep treads.
And I might find that nature
And my town
Are two pages of a book
Stuck together.
Benjamin Leuty is a high school senior at Ruth Asawa School of the Arts in San Francisco. His work has appeared in his school literary journal Umläut. In his spare time, he cycles, reads, plays video games, and hops up and down.
