Prose and poetry by Leen Raats
My poem #Prague was published in Descant, a magazine edited by students from a university in Texas. It’s part of the 63rd edition of this paper magazine. Even more exciting: they nominated my poem for the 2024 Pushcart Prize.
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This morning I woke up in the dark.
With pain in my stomach and the voice of the radio newsreader.
Yet the day felt clean. Birds sang along the railway track.
At Brussels Central Station I saw a beggar with a bloodstained face
who no one seemed to see. I asked if I could help. I couldn’t.
Even though I know all about being invisible.
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You are safe now I’m here.
Muscles grown, back straight, fists ready.
No one will harm you.
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After all these years you still don't know
how to live, just like every night you
seem to have forgotten how to fall asleep.
It feels indeed like falling
into the arms of the unknown
that you should have been
familiar with by now.
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I'll just have to learn to live with it
said the specialist who casually diagnosed an illness
which he didn't explain, which I had never heard of
but from which I had been suffering for years
and that maybe it was partly my own fault.
I shouldn’t have been so eager to live.
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We are made up of layers.
Like this landscape that
reads like an old book.
Crooked apple trees with names
reminding me of a song
that hasn’t echoed
over these hills for a long time.
Lees meer
My poem Chronic was published in the Spring 2024 edition of Pleiades, in the special folio ‘On Disability’. Pleiades: Literature in Context is published twice a year by the University of Central Missouri and features work from both established and upcoming writers from around the world.
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My poem “Room to Breathe” appeared in Crannóg Magazine
(issue 60, Spring 2024), a leading Irish literary magazine. I am one of
45 writers published in this issue.
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Leen writes 