Julia Leverone: The Good Knife

Falco Negenman

Unproductivity

When I leave it
in the sink, my love,
the good knife
sprouts a variable
circle of rust.
I leave it unintentionally,
as I think you know.
The leaving meant
to be undone
in reasonable-enough
time, my love,
and I know you know
I possess a sense
of the enough like rust,
testing,
surviving,
when I’m friable, exposed,
tending positively
the way in which
division can produce.

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Julia Leverone is a comparatist teaching Spanish and creative writing at UT Dallas. She has two chapbooks, the most recent of which won the 2016 Claudia Emerson Poetry Chapbook Award from JMWW. Her translations have been published in magazines including Witness and The Massachusetts Review, and her poems have been accepted or published in Sugar House Review, Posit, Cimarron Review, and Crab Orchard Review. She edits Sakura Review.