This is Not a Place of Honor, John Leo
Night Gallery Press, 2024
Don’t
ask me the time.
For years it has been 3:42.
I have pulled the page off the calendar
and every next page says March.
What’s that joke? “I’m still processing last March?” The first four lines of “The War is Ongoing,” the prologue poem in John Leo’s second full-length collection, This is Not a Place of Honor, more than nails it on the head. But it also gives the reader a sneaky preview of what’s to come. Yes, many of these poems bubble from our collective experience of the last handful of years, but Leo also has a foot in the past. I mean the long-ago kind of past. A little further on in the same poem: “Hannibal is invading over the Alps. / I can hear the elephants in their snowshoes.” So, now what?
Cannae, Chrysippus, and Clark Gable all make appearances here, among others. These evocations are reminiscent of Leo’s first collection, The Names of Ancient Wars, and it’s easy to walk the bridge between that book and this one. In this second collection, Leo’s voice is more seasoned and he flexes it to great effect, especially in what might be considered the “quieter” moments of the book.
The title poem finds a speaker who’s
been stood-up on a date, sitting in a taco joint. Consigned to watching
football, there is a hurt, a kind of longing that’s easy to recognize: “I
should be admiring your tan / as it disappears into the dimming lights.” And
then the sharp turn in the next stanza: “I have of late considered / the
disposal of nuclear waste.” The speaker imagines a future where the landscape
is “paved and scorched black”; the only thing that remains is “a plaque etched
from brass and riveted / in permanent warning: / This is not a place of honor.”
It might be easy to imagine why the date didn’t show. But this apocalyptic
thinking gives way to duende at the poem’s end:
The
bartender tells me Harry
does not pay her what she is owed.
The penalty, she tells me,
for breaking a promise,
is a thousand years with the people you love.
What is “this place” that’s referred to in the book’s title? What does honor mean to the speaker(s) of these poems? There’s much that can be speculated upon on that front. History repeats. The war is ongoing. But really, if your eyes are open, you already know this. So why visit this place? John Leo, in a voice both Midwestern and wise, takes a reader on a tour of waking life in the world-at-large, proving that, while it’s technically 2024, it’s also still last March, always already the past.
Nate Logan is the author of Wrong Horse (Moria Books, 2024) and Inside the Golden Days of Missing You (Magic Helicopter Press, 2019). He lives in Indiana.