Barbara Harris Leonhard

This isn’t a sonnet about gold-leafed mantels
lined with stolen trophies. It’s about our grannies,

crocheting mantles of our legacies. This is a sonnet
for the Jackson Magnolia. Its demise provides space

for a vast golden ballroom fashioned for the fake king.
This sonnet isn’t for that great pretender.

This is a sonnet about underage girls exploited
by power and privilege. It’s about the injured.

The disabled. The murdered. The brown. The black.
The truthsayers. The exiled laborers. All those

‘disappeared’. Denied. All those torn from their cribs—
naked, shackled toddlers. It’s for Good and Pretti.

This isn’t a sonnet about the unspined.
It’s about the unsung. All those maligned.

Barbara Harris Leonhard is the author of Three-Penny Memories: A Poetic Memoir (2022) and The Lost Book of Zeroth (2025). She is co-author of Too Much Fun to Be Legal (2024) and Broken Rengay: Unruly Poetry (2025). She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. Trending Poets recently named her Poet of the Year. Her poetry has been translated into Italian, Albanian, and Chinese. She is the editor for Masticadores USA, FEED THE HOLY, and Latinos USA.

This poem appears in Uprooted: Poems of Resistance, Witness, and Survival (The Chaos Section Poetry Project, Fall 2026). We’re sharing each poem from the collection individually over the coming weeks. You can read the full book or download the free PDF here.