Leonora Simonovis

A mAn Held a gun to my Stomach once

his eyes looked beyond me   I
didn’t need to be dying to have 

an out-of-body experience   in that 
moment I wished myself gone  

gun: a hollow eye shaped like
a circle the Latin for circle is 

circus. In El Circo de los Hermanos Gasca
I saw a trainer prod an elephant 

with an electric rod shocking her body 
into submission another trainer 

put his head inside the maw of an 
enormous lion   the creature’s

eyes as unnerved as my assailant’s  
who held his gun tight does it dispel 

fear? I wondered his hand trembled 
like the lion’s jaw as he smelled fresh 

prey he couldn’t touch I want to 
forget about the circus and the gun  

in my dreams I see not the glassy 
look of the animals but a hand and 

a whip pulling the barrel of the gun away
from my belly as I slide to the ground

a body can only hold so much before it detonates 
in the same way a bullet compresses desire   then lets it go

You can read more of Leonora Simonovis’ work in the print edition of The Arkansas International 8.

Leonora Simonovis grew up in Caracas, Venezuela, and currently lives in San Diego. She is a professor of Spanish and Caribbean literature and culture at the University of San Diego and an MFA candidate in poetry at Antioch University, Los Angeles. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Kenyon Review blog, Storyscape, Tifetet Journal, the Acentos Review, the American Journal of Poetry, The Rumpus, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal. Her chapbook manuscript, Waiting for a Ripe Mango, was a finalist for the Snowbound Tupelo Prize Award.