Two Poems by Stefanie Leigh

The Stilling of Movement

After your class ended, and all the dancers bled
into gossip, fouettés, stretches,
and Band-Aids, you sauntered over to the corner,
lifted my fingertips and pulled, so my hips slid
further, further, further over
the box of my pointe shoe, and I hovered

over an abyss. My back
leg extended long, high, quivering. If you let
go, I would fall. So, your words
held my waist like a corset and sweat
pooled at my neck as I gulped down the echo
of the now-empty studio—

How eighty dancers evaporated—my mind
and eyes laid down on the Marley. I lowered
my leg, came off pointe, and you released
my hand, but not my presence, and my knees
knocked together beneath your breathing
and I wondered what else you expected me to do.

*

My Therapist Said, No Amount of Healing Will Make a Toxic Environment Safe

Sixteen years after leaving my ballet career—my soul
and bones no longer bleeding—I was back at the barre

three times, then four, then five times a week, angled in,
balancing in passé. Now forty, my chest eventually

remembered how to stack above my pelvis, arms
extended, my left ankle anchoring me to the Marley.

I was perfectly still, the piano pedaling through my
intestines, when a fog I didn’t know was covering

my gaze dissipated. I breathed forward,
not even an inch, expanded from the inside, into

a world I had only ever watched from behind
a scrim. After barre, one of the elderly ladies came over,

Dear, you always look gorgeous, but something
is different. Like you have a full outline—for the first time.

*

Stefanie Leigh is a poet and ballet dancer based in Toronto. She was a dancer with American Ballet Theatre and is currently working on her first poetry collection, Swan Arms. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Rust & Moth, SWWIM, Frozen Sea, Thimble Lit and elsewhere.