Jean LeBlanc

Jean LeBlanc lives in Sussex County, New Jersey. Newly-retired from teaching college writing and literature, she is immersed in creating her own poetry and art. Her most recent collection is Terrible Terrain: Poems Inspired by the Life of Lavinia Dickinson (Shanti Arts Publishing, 2023).

Our Family Tree and Other Myths

Somewhere in these low-lying leaves,

a lie. Commission or omission. Shame

or kindness, siblings as they are.

What the genes reveal, the paper trail

goes nowhere near. Does it matter enough

that, if you could have the dead back

for an hour, these would be the questions

you would ask? Would you bring

mortification or misplaced kind intent

into the open, watch their faces

collapse from awe to anguish?

Interrogate them into silence—

why should the dead be any different

from the living, why shouldn’t secrets

be the fruits that never fall?

Wife of the Poet

Look for my name in the index.

Look under “wife.”

Look under “influences.”

Look under last year’s leaves, matted down

by months of snow, in the iris bed.

Look through boxes

of books, of papers

from that year of teaching

at a small private college.

Tea and cake, the devoted spouse.

Look under "marriage." Ah!

There you’ll find the list of grievances:

Children, burden of.

Madness, family history of.

Money, problems with.

Although you could have found me,

once, at the edge of that iris bed,

cutting blooms that came

too early, a deceptive spring

here then not.

Or maybe in the meadow

where one year, indigo buntings—

but that’s gone now, too,

the controlled burn,

the plowing under.