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.

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“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