McLeod Logue
I’m thrilled that our first, special poetry issue is launching with these two poems from McLeod Logue. McLeod’s poetry is deeply felt with powerful ties to place. In these poems, the speaker is haunted by a wind phone in her home state, Alabama. The voice in “Reclamation” is powerful, asking the reader to see the world as she does: “Let me tell you how this life was meant for monotony,/how everything I’ll ever need was already right there/in front of me.”
McLeod’s poetry is always a delight, and I’m so excited that we’re sharing these poems in our special issue.
-Michael
The Wind Phone
This is the only Alabama
I know. A boy on a bike breaking
even with a fleet of geese.
The sky darkened under the arrow
of movement. Two fates
on the teetering wood of a front
porch, rocking like clay soldiers.
And Robin in the unrolling spool
of that front yard. I will remember
her like this—a hundred miles
of language. She is lit from above
in the missing day of the phone booth,
wind spinning from that thin space.
Georgia’s waiting on the other line.
I’m sure of it. I’m saying it now
so I remember what it was to be loved
from here and beyond.
Reclamation
I.
Tell me again how the whole world belongs
in the four corners of this relapsed state.
I can see to the middle of next week; more
of the same unknowing loneliness. Patchy skin
around the surface, trying to keep up with all this
awful change. I’m stubborn like a bruised rib. Stubborn
like a deck of cards, fifty-two faces, and not one willing
to flip. Let me tell you how this life was meant for monotony,
how everything I’ll ever need was already right there
in front of me. I’m losing my voice to the church hill winds,
spitting out my accent for the clean line roads to keep.
I don’t want her anymore, I’m tired of becoming.
II.
I’m a stone's throw away, skipping closer on the aching
back of what’s to come, catching my teeth on this zipper
lined edge. It’s not home if the air tastes like nothing, spit
leaking its way into all my good memories. It’ll take me
years to realize that scrubbing myself clean from my history
means I can’t get the drift lines back, the wrinkles
from all the places that touched me. My grandaddy says
I got my pretty face from him, one hundred generations
of noses in a row. And all the seeds we planted took root,
wrapped around my skinny ankles. When is someone
gonna tell me I can’t run from the things that claim me?
Stuck in that same stupid limbo. Nowhere girl.
III.
Here’s what I know. My body’s lost
to time, sitting on the concrete steps
of the house that taught me to settle.
Blue shutters and those humbled strips of paint
peeling back to show the before. I’m voiceless
in the driveway, my feet pooling down
to the earth where they belong. I’ve missed
the red stain of the sky, the arch of those almost
mountains. Everything I remember is just
the same—the slanted porch, the big window,
all those years of fighting to be somewhere else.
That knee-jerk reaction never left my body,
but here is where I know to surrender. I can feel
the moment tingling against my skin. I’ll let
the earth absorb me, kiss me just the way
I want it to, warm to the touch.
I’m still small enough to be held
in the perfect pocket of Alabama.
McLeod Logue is a poet from Birmingham, Alabama. She received her MFA from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she taught creative writing. Her work has appeared in print in The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume X: Alabama (Texas Review Press, 2023), and online in Blackbird, The Sonora Review, The Nashville Review, and elsewhere.
Follow her on Instagram and check out more of her work here.