christopher-leibow
50/M/United States
Christopher Leibow is a poet, a visual artist and a performer of small slights of hand. He is an MFA graduate of Antioch and has been published in numerous journals and online, including Juked, Interim, and Barrow Street and Cricket Online Review.
On the left, I write an epic and on the curve of the right; a haiku. On her belly I build a city whose streets teem with peacocks, their thousand eyes watch over her. Between her legs I make a bed, I build a subway; I build a pyre that lights the city I have built on her belly.
On her back I project old silent movies; the flickering light makes her tremble. Her right arm is a snake that climbs up my spine; awakes me from sleep. Her left arm is a tree that reaches into the earth to placate the dead. Each foot is a bird that hovers over my head, as I hold her wrist down to the white fields of the bed.
She is between my legs, she takes me into her mouth; I lie back like a ship in a building storm. I become the crescendo of operas, a breath hovering. My body is a long sigh of silence, like the migrating monarch butterflies paralyzed by uncommon winds that rain down on the streets of Tehran. The sun warms us and we take hesitant flight.
There, a man with a pinhole camera takes our photograph that he wires to the top of the Eiffel Tower. We are two electric eels entwined like the filament of a lamp, lighting all of Paris.
Apr 25, 2025
Apr 25, 2025 at 3:40 PM UTC
Love arrives at my door
with a knock and a revolver.
“How much do you love me?”
she asks. I stutter—
and she soaks me in her sweat.
I feel rejuvenated,
and Love pushes me down,
buries me beneath leaves
and flowers.
“I love you this much…” I say,
and die peacefully—
while the ****** stumps
of my once-wings twitch
slightly.
We go off in a boat,
Love is captain, I am crew.
She now has a shiny hook
for a hand. She gestures me over:
“How do you love me?”
With perfect concentration,
I unscrew her hook,
tie the string of night to it,
and swing it up—
catching the open-mouthed moon.
With a quick tug,
I bring it down for her.
We lay on the water together,
watching the boat drift off—
smaller and smaller—
and Love and I
float for a lifetime or two,
watching satellites wink
as they fly by.
I ask her, “Love,
how much do you love me?”
“So much. That’s all I say,”
she answers.
“Sooooooo much!”
“But how? How do you love me?”
She smiles,
reaches for the light switch
on the other side of the sun—
CLICK.
She curls up next to me
in the darkest of dark,
in the blackest of black.
She spoons me close,
her good hand on my heart.
“This much,” she whispers,
“and this is how.”
Apr 25, 2025
Apr 25, 2025 at 3:27 PM UTC
I would have you hold me again,
but I am frightened.
The water fills the shower ankle deep
When I was small I swore it was possible
to go down the drain. Nothing she said
could convince me otherwise. She was wrong.
I need to move away from here.
My dog has become anxious
There are gunshots every night.
I swear she dreams of chasing the bus you left on.
She whimpers so loud, Sirius has started to complain.
I close my eyes and try to count 10 but can never make it
past six – I am worried that when I close my eyes the North
Star looks for a way out.
I would hold you again, but I am uneasy.
Like that muggy august night when I saw
a coyote sulking and wet under a streetlight
on Sepulveda. It was strange, no one was out.
So strange, you couldn’t believe it
but I shake all the time.
Apr 25, 2025
Apr 25, 2025 at 3:23 PM UTC
“Sometimes love is stronger than a man’s convictions.”
– Isaac Bashevis Singer
1.
There are wars, and rumors of wars—
machineries, machinations
of singular dark days,
and clouds that hang
like props above our city.
We shut the windows,
refuse to watch their play.
Hungrily, we take refuge
between each other’s legs.
How comforting it is
to love without armies,
without tanks,
without generals of reasoned love.
---
2.
There are wars, and rumors of wars—
machineries, machinations
of singular dark days.
From the narrow street, they see us
wrestling with an angel—
the tug of limbs, the tangle of hair.
You whisper low,
your seditious talk of love—
as my callused hands get caught
in your low moaning—
while I hold you down
to the bed,
my captive.
The occupation has begun—
your occupied body,
my country of ardent prayers.
---
2.
There are wars—
machineries, machinations
of singular dark days.
The soldiers are leaving for the front.
Not us.
We stay behind,
to wage our war
of tenderness.
They leave this morning.
Applaud their sad theater—
the warships, the planes.
Soon,
letters will arrive
without them.
A few men will return—
gaunt, less than before—
with more silence,
less dancing.
And when they do,
our war will have ended
under a flag
of white bed sheets.
Only a little blood.
Victorious,
we’ll write love letters
on each other’s bodies.
Apr 25, 2025
Apr 25, 2025 at 3:20 PM UTC
“Does anyone still want to go with me into a panorama?”
Max Brod
The sun floats down river
resting from a long day.
as Barvard draws love
birds in the sand.
She tries to explain
how his deformity angers her.
Unable, she leaves him
on the other side of the shore.
Banvard becomes a traveling salesman,
a campfire fiddler,
a drunk, a painter of shores.
Yearning for her -
He turns her into the Mississippi shore.
Riding the long river, floating
on a brush, he paints her portrait.
Huge bolts of love
The canvas sags from longing
Immense wood contraption
(gears-pulleys crank machinery)
Three miles of canvas.
An uninterrupted portrait.
The papers publish the spectacle
“The hunch back painter and his panorama!”
He builds a wooden stage
Winds up river then down.
The lines are long, (.50 cents.)
they wait for hours….
He sits in the middle
of hungry brush stroke
Up river
down. Up river down
eyes straining
to find her.
To be published by JUKED.COM
Apr 23, 2024
Apr 23, 2024 at 3:39 PM UTC
The correspondence she writes is in the shape of a dog−
fills them with anecdotes of dressers
and the first two years of her life spent in a drawer.
We meet in Zurich over a nightmare –
(sleep under an argument)–
Travel to Berlin where a priest walks between us.
She promises to write.
Her letters are like a leap year. She writes riddles
about the price of post and serious Marian treaties –
only cursorily mentioning the living.
I read her letters like an eating
disorder. I try to decipher the hermetic meaning
of the word Shvod in all the margins.
Her last line reads,
“I must beat the walls it is March…”
Apr 23, 2024
Apr 23, 2024 at 3:37 PM UTC
A green streetcar is standing alone in the rain,
The man on the corner is staring at the green street-
Car . He is trying to remember
His daughters fifth birthday.
The green streetcar is alone in the rain.
The man is alone on the street in the rain.
He is staring at the streetcar, trying to remember
His daughter’s best friend’s name.
The man can hear the rain falling on
The empty green streetcar.
Rain is running down the back of his
neck and it is making him cold.
She is so much older now.
Apr 23, 2024
Apr 23, 2024 at 3:36 PM UTC
Her subtle lean left
accentuates the curve
of her waist - reminds
me of the curve of a street
in Rome where – I falll
in love with time
that moved so slowly –
The movement in the song
she plays for me turns
towards me, - The air
is a scented moment
of bed linens, lilacs,
leather, wood, ***
soil - where memories
are instantaneous –
Everything is memory –
Everything has taken place – I am
in the middle of a Matinee
that I have never seen
before, but remember
so fondly. I am here now.
I easily could have been anywhere else.
Apr 23, 2024
Apr 23, 2024 at 3:34 PM UTC
The Lone Ranger writes a letter
to his Tanto, he writes,
things are not as they used to be.
I am as useless as an Iron Lung.
Riding around in his Ford Pinto
The Lone Ranger looks for anything
to do − the one working headlight
finding vultures on the side
of the road.
Driving through the night
scanning the radio for WXYZ
This long prairie night of his soul.
finding no one to save
he buys a **********
with a case of silver bullets.
She holds him like a little boy
Rocks him back and forth.
They don’t have ***
He cries in her arms,
“I’m a man in a boy’s costume,”
“I am a jaw bone at a wedding.”
Later that evening
The Lone Ranger writes another letter
Dear Tanto,
Things are not as they used to be.
I am as useless as mouth without teeth.
I wish you were here.
Sincerely, Lone.
Apr 23, 2024
Apr 23, 2024 at 3:32 PM UTC
1. I did conspire to love you.
2. The moon was happy with us.
3. Baudrillard’s concept of “Object Fetishism” is more relevant than Marx’s.
4. Thank you.
5. Trees are closer to heaven than the angels. (I know, you already know that, but I like the line).
6. You have the most beautiful sorrowful eyes.
7. The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens. (RILKE 1912)
8. Locomotives fall in love going in opposite directions.
9. Certain earthquakes do not like themselves.
10. The more one contemplates the less one lives; the more one accepts recognizing himself in the dominant images of need, the less one understands ones’ own existence and ones’ own desires. (Debord 1967)
11. I did plot to love you.
12. The black crow on the wire is not me.
13. Umbrellas can be opened inside. (Only black; counter intuitive, I know).
14. Your touch; my body remembers softly.
15. I did love you.
16. Clocks sometimes stop for no reason.
17. Even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that contains a desire or its reverse, a fear…Everything conceals something else.
(CALVINO 1972)
18 Sometimes letters sent, never arrive.
19. Only you ever made me blush.
20. In the end, everything is just a dream.
21. This poem will maximize your interval times.
22. Love is ambiguous, at best a “Contamination”, from the Latin *** tangere. “leaving a tactile print.”
23. I will let you go.
24. I will publish this poem
25. I will always love you.
Sincerely Mr. Leibow
Apr 23, 2024
Apr 23, 2024 at 3:28 PM UTC