Tara Skurtu

Leprechaun
June 24, 2022 Skurtu Tara

LEPRECHAUN

 

The old woman next door would appear in
our courtyard with a hand broom of sticks,

 

dashing up and down the walkway
sweeping the rain each time it poured.

 

Sometimes I’d look up from the kitchen table
and there she was, waving at me as she ran

 

up the stairs to our bedroom. She took
everything she wanted. Even a scraggly

 

bush in our yard—one morning I found it
in her yard. Unbelievable, how magical

 

thinking kept me thinking I could garden
the marriage, until the man I’d married said

 

that woman had her eye on the unknown fruit
sapling I watered each week, and with shears

 

I snapped the thorny trunk in half.

 

Tara Skurtu is the author of The Amoeba Game and the upcoming poetry collection Faith Farm. A two-time Fulbright grantee and recipient of a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship and two Academy of American Poets prizes, she is the founder of International Poetry Circle, a national steering committee member of Writers for Democratic Action, and works as a writing coach. Tara’s recent poems appear in SalmagundiThe CommonThe Baffler, and Poetry Wales.