Poetry by Dan Leach

Dan Leach has published poems and stories in The Greensboro Review, The Southern Review, and The Sun. He is the 2023 recipient of Texas Review Press’s Southern Poetry Breakthrough Award, and his debut novel, Junah at the End of the World, won the South Carolina Novel Prize and was released by Hub City in June 2025. He lives in Summerville and teaches writing at Charleston Southern University.

Job Opening

Outside the Baptist college,
the adjunct, officially warned,
enjoys his last cigarette.

Oil on Canvas

I watched you steal firewood
from the neighbor's rick
and construct a small castle
at the edge of our field.
You didn't tell anyone
what you were doing,
and when we called your name
because dinner was ready
you neglected to respond.
I loved how, after entering,
you sealed yourself inside
with the last of the logs,
as if to say to the world,
your food can wait,
I am working in here.

Reset

I turned forty in a town where the houses sit like milk teeth
in the mouth of a skittish kid. I almost turned into a pond.

Some nights I step outside to feel a little nothing. Solidarity is
seeing the moon looking sad with all that darkness on his back.

I have a red-haired boss at the college whom I love like a trope.
I have a wife who paints people in such quiet shades of green.

Those who say the South is a place–correct. Those who say
the South is self-published poetry –also correct. As for me,

I always wanted to be a kid who grew up beside a river.
My red-haired boss says, with hard work, anything’s possible.