Leave
after Martha Collins
because it is to create an acute
angle an angle shaped like a
wedge because it is to give
birth to what you already know
to be expendable after it
has cleaned after it has fed
you because you are enriched
by even its deterioration because
the join might seem slender
like a throat because the bud might
seem tender like a bud but in this
tenderness you do not share you
do not share anything because even
the join is also a jamb a harbinger
of scab a rust-red portal that shuts
down what it depletes that shuts
out the obsolete because you keep
what is inside from seeping out
because you keep what is outside from
slipping in because in the singular
and as a noun you are a form
of formal permission as in why
don’t you make like a tree and…
Copyright © 2021 by Monica Youn. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 22, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
“I wrote this poem thinking about the history of U.S. immigration—how economic interests brought immigrants here as a source of cheap labor, only to reject them after their work had been done. I found myself considering the layered meanings of the word leave—as a verb, either a description of a botanical process or an imperative suggesting expulsion (as in Brexit); as a noun, an offer of permission from a hierarchical authority. I started with the image of a tree—how it puts forth leaves to nourish itself, only to shed them once that function is finished—to grow a part of the body intended to be dispensable. The form is an homage to Martha Collins, who was my fellow resident at the Lannan Foundation in Marfa, where I wrote this poem.”
—Monica Youn
Monica Youn
Monica Youn grew up in Houston, Texas. She received a BA from Princeton University, a JD from Yale Law School, and an MPhil from the University of Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar.