Desire

By Julia Morgan Leatham

when a man approaches me I think he is approaching my body / this is not because I want to distrust him / I want to trust him / like I want to trust the rising tide / not to over-reach its swell / but I don't turn my back on either

In her debut collection of poems, Julia Morgan Leatham analyzes the emotion of desire t

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Jun 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781637300817

Book preview

author’s note:

I am interested in power. Power belongs to the person who defines reality. Power is creation. Who gets to say what really happened? Who gets to say what is true? Who gets to say what is real?

I thought about this a lot in the past few years as a US citizen under Trump’s presidency and in a world of manipulated media.

Power is possible because of the inherent subjective nature of reality.

Beneath all this subjective interpretation, all this seizing of power, lies raw experience. Unfiltered emotion is freeing. For me, as a twenty-two-year-old woman, my most pure and private emotion is desire.

I learned recently about ancient poets who wrote about beautiful gardens that did not exist. Writing them into cerebral existence rather than planting them into the physical world meant that nobody could take them away, nobody could touch them.

Raw desire is unaltered truth. Writing life into this emotion allows it to bloom in a space where nobody can destroy it.

In this collection I explore our world’s lack of objective reality, with a particular attention to the strife created by differing accounts of love, sex, and self-worth.

These poems are a series of contemplations rather than any kind of personal manifesto. I hope they raise questions of why we believe something is true and how each of our perceptions is unique.

In my experience of the world, desire is real. Everything else is interpretation.

first look

I first fell in love in preschool

I’d drag my step-stool out to the garden in my backyard

sink it carefully in the damp soil so I could step up

and pull my body onto our compost barrel

peek over the fence, through the bamboo

trade Pokémon cards with my flaxen-haired fiancé

I’d sit straddling the compost barrel for hours

my legs squeezed tightly against the heat

burning on the