Leona Sevick

Confession

A man I admire, a good man, asked me
Are you a nun, too? and I thought of all 

the mornings, what a question to ask! It 
was a natural one, given that we 

share an acquaintance, a nun I told him 
we both know. But on this morning I laughed 

too loudly with an energy I could 
not explain to this gently probing man, 

and when he turned to search my eyes with his
I nearly told him everything: how I 

couldn’t eat, how the fluttering of this 
unhappy bird in my chest was catching 

my breath, how you can believe so firmly 
you are one person only to find out 

you’re someone else entirely. This fine 
man, a poet, might have found something still 

to love in me, might have told me this is
the world, that we are all sinners. For the 

dark gift that means I can never love what 
I hold in my hands, already, would he 

have asked God’s forgiveness on my behalf?
The truth is I’ve had more lovers than friends.

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Leona Sevick’s poems appear in The Journal, Crab Orchard Review, The Normal School, and elsewhere. Her work also appears in The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks. Sevick is the 2017 Press 53 Poetry Award Winner for Lion Brothers, her first full-length collection, and she was named a 2018 Tennessee Williams Scholar for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.