Leonardo Chung: LATE SUMMER • Cleaver Magazine

Poetry by Leonardo Chung
LATE SUMMER

The grass rasps against our shirts
while above us, planes bound for MDW,
start white-ink sentences they won’t finish.
We lie where the mower left a seam—ants
commuting over our wrists, pollen keeping them
fresh, ready for fall. By the time the sun finds

our soft places, we have said it plainly.
We are going to die soon.
The words, once coined, settle in the clover bed.

Phones faceless in the grass,
the water bottle sweating its last cold.
no one is waiting who shouldn’t already know.
A neighbor’s sprinkler counts for us
a code we remember—short, short, long.

You press your palm to my ribs to feel proof
that the body is a door, the knock answered
from both sides. I trace the bruise of shade
settling across your cheek, how the wind ripples
our T-shirts into weather.

We start naming what to forgive—
your father’s quiet exits, my habit
of rehearsing disasters out loud,
the week we pretended nothing was wrong.
The list is long, and keeps
collapsing back into breath between us.

A ball thuds the fence and becomes a second heart.
We stay still enough to hear the green blood
gushing through the stems, the cul-de-sac’s distant hiss
salting the roads with steam.

We stay because moving would break the spell—
our knees printing the dirt, our backs
holding the heat the earth is trying to lose.

Belief has to live somewhere, so today
it lives here, between our shadows.
Soon is a real place,
the border we keep brushing without crossing.

When the shade slips into another field, we leave
with it—smelling of the lawn’s crushed mint
from where we tried to cool our wrists.
The ground, having borne our weight,
wanted us to remember it.

Leonardo Chung is a Korean-American writer who recently won First Place in Poetry in the Los Angeles Review. His work appears in Los Angeles Review, Epiphany, Chestnut Review, Chautauqua, and others. He draws inspiration from distinguished poets such as Langston Hughes, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Louise Glück.