SPLASH STUDY
by Leigh Lucas
The head of
my beloved lay in my lap.
It was a breathing, blinking, heavy head. I was cradling it with Great
Gentleness, like I would hold a baby or a very important egg.
The beautiful living man
Closed his eyes and let one rip—eight seconds, maybe longer, a record
breaker toot for the ages.
You need a body to form flatulence. You need an itchy, squelching, horny
body. That’s just the way it is.
Since he took his body from me,
I’ve tried the usual substitutes: photographs, stuffed animals, an actual pet.
Then I drew a stick figure on each page of my notebook so the figure could
watch me write, then I crucified one over my bed, a little Jesus looking
down on me.
I tried men that looked like him and one that looked like my pet, but
nothing was the same.
I tried punishing my body, I tried to kill it. I indulged it, I begged for its life.
Now I ask myself: How will I get his body back? A body, what is that? Does skin outline it
When he was with me, he was uncontainable. —Ma’am is this his body?
They asked the woman whose baby he really was. They’d scooped his body out of the water and dried it off.
When he took his body from me,
He also took it from his mother and his father. There were hordes of us in fact, swarms of sweaty, grieving bodies, grumbling and swaying and
gnashing our teeth. I imagine the weight of a human head in my lap, I sing
so he can cry.
I pretend to live by lying perfectly still, by closing my eyes and picturing
his feet, so long and fish-shaped, then picturing his chest so thin, and
breathing air into mine. But it’s a grubby thing, a body, everyday
decaying, creaking, humping, leaking orifice by orifice. Skin never keeps
its sac of saps intact. It’s needy, greedy, doesn’t listen.
Still,
it can sing.
Leigh Lucas is a writer in San Francisco. Her poetry collection Splashed Things was selected by Maya C. Popa for the A. Poulin Jr. Prize from Boa Editions and will be published spring 2026. Her chapbook Landsickness (Tupelo Press, 2024) was selected by Chen Chen for the 2023 Sunken Garden Poetry Chapbook Award. Leigh’s writing can be found in Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Adroit, Poetry Society of America, and elsewhere. She holds a BA from Stanford and an MFA from Warren Wilson.