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the poet
Francesca Leader’s poetry has been featured in Stone Circle, Abyss & Apex, The Broadkill Review, Pinhole Poetry and elsewhere. Named the winner of the Southeast Review’s World’s Best Short-Short Story Contest in 2023, she was a runner-up in Cutbank’s 2020 Big Sky, Small Prose Contest, and had her work included in Best Small Fictions 2025. Francesca's first poetry chapbook, Like Wine or Like Pain, appeared in April 2024.
the poems
Our First Bed
Was a Riverbank
and I think that’s wonderful. No one,
for centuries longer than graves are guaranteed,
will wash the sheets, change the mattress,
tamper with passion’s sacred traces, because
the first place you fucked me is fixed as a boulder
in the deep-bedded waters that breathed
cool light, our bodies sand-skinned upon its lips;
fixed as the spring return of bluebells
that bloomed our path to that shivering
tryst; fixed as anything can be,
which is to say more fixed than any non-river
kind of bed, or bedroom, or any kind of room,
but less than the universe, but not by much,
because the fact of where we were
when we did what we did is part of nature,
a thing in nature not soon or ever
to be trammelled by man’s transience.
The place is our bodies, the why we have bodies –
so as to hold, not just behold, the one we love;
to know we exist, and the universe in us.
River banks and beds will shift, but not as human
beds shift. I believe soil, like water, has memory,
and we left our salt and metallic secretions, and
the earth took them back and said yes,
these were always – will always – be mine.
Weights & Measures
I still don’t know how
You can compliment a girl
Without infecting her,
Say she’s perfect
Without seeding worry
Of when she won’t be
Anymore, span her
Waist with hands
Amarvel at its minuteness
Without encoding
Lovability as the ability
To fit inside something
Else, submit to
Subsumption. I still don’t
Know how you can
Expect a girl’s soul
Not to snag on BMI charts,
Measurements, body fat
Ratios, celebrity weight
Loss and Half My Size stories,
Because they’re
Everywhere – number-shaped
Briars ensnarling all
Paths to self-acceptance –
Or tell her to inure,
Ignore, be tough but soft,
A paradox, like vanity sizing
That makes her crave
The labels that anoint her
A 2 and damn the brands
That brand her a 12,
As if she could be 'S'
And 'L' at once,
Survive the truth
Of weighing and measuring how
Much she matters in inverse
Proportion to how much
(Always too much) matter
She comprises, for bodies
Most loved are the
Bodies that least exist.
I still don’t know how
You can call a girl
Beautiful because she’s thin
Or ugly because she isn’t
Without engendering
Pathology, a fixation sickness
On what is visible
Instead of what is whole.
I Am Duck Phillips in Mad Men
Season 3, Episode 12
Peggy’s at the door of Duck’s hotel room
when they announce that JFK’s been shot,
and Duck unplugs the TV, pulls Peggy inside
and kisses her, and they have their nooner
before either of them must face
what’s happened, because I think Duck
knows that the world has always been burning –
that it was sabretooth tigers and gum-rot
before it was plague and famine and war.
I think Duck, like me, is long past stopping
for any flame not fed on bliss.
Publishing credits
Our First Bed Was a Riverbank: Meat for Tea (Vol. 18, Issue 3)
Weights & Measures: One Art (October 2025)
I Am Duck Phillips in Mad Men Season 3, Episode 12:
Trampoline Poetry (Issue 31)