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HEALING WITH SHADOWS
Poems by Nikia Leopold
“Nikia Leopold is an exquisite receiver of sensory news, complex emotions, hints of meaning. Her poems are passionate, delicate, fierce, brave.”—MARY AZRAEL, Publisher of Passager
“Nikia Leopold’s poetry springs from a true creative necessity, its depth expressed and distilled through a mastery of craft. These are poems to be moved by, to remember.”—MICHAEL MILLER, Author of Entering the Day
THE PHRASE
Sometimes, traversing a day,
the phrase arrives:
‘My kind father.’
I pause, go on,
knowing this is a way
we’re remembered.
Nothing specific,
nothing planned or sacramental,
no sacrifice of a pure white goat,
just this small tide that rises,
slipping over the basin’s lip
into a dry patch of my life.
Nikia Leopold is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars in Poetry, and has a PhD in Art History, also from Hopkins. Her poems have appeared in various magazines, including The American Scholar, Commonweal, Measure, The Southern Review, and Poetry. Her chapbook, Dark Feathers, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2004. Another, Small Pleasures, won the 2012 Blue Light Press Contest. Her book, Swan and Jack-knife, was published by Main Street Rag in 2015. She writes and illustrates children’s books and lives in Ruxton, Maryland with her cat, Tinker.
Trapped in Amber
ALSO BY NIKIA LEOPOLD