Poetry: “I don’t know how an overdose works,” by Anna Leonard

By Anna Leonard | June 19, 2026

The loss of a loved one is particularly challenging to navigate when, in life, helping them navigate addiction added friction to the relationship. Anna Leonard’s poem captures this friction in the exploration of knowing versus not knowing, negligibility versus negligence. The poem’s form—stanzas in brief couplets—allows for fragments of information to emerge much in the same way the speaker learns about what will happen to the body of the dead. The couplets lend themselves to interlinking thoughts which move seamlessly and quickly from one thought to the next in the opening lines, from face, to furnace, to metal. Then, the speaker lands for a time in a central obsession about the ash and fragments drifting into the sky and back to the earth in a new form—rain or snow—eventually cycling back to the opening images of the poem.

Read Leonard’s poem below.

I don’t know how an overdose works,

but I know of the monkey—
I can’t remember if he tattooed its image

onto his back or if that is another
memory made up—

I suppose it doesn’t matter
in the face of a furnace.

His face in that furnace.
I imagine he savored its warmth,

his cold skin stiff like metal
the last time we touched.

In cremation, all metal is removed
from the body, and the bone

fragments which do not burn
are ground into an ash-like sand,

so not all ashes are ashes.
I am sorry to share this fact

if you, reader, were hoping to evade
knowing more than you already do.

The rough bits of him
pulverized—

There may be isolated particles
that become lost within the chamber,

but this is usually a negligible amount.

What is a negligible amount, considering

much of him evaporated in that chamber:
soft tissue liquified and risen to sky,

and where does that go—
it surely must fall, perhaps has fallen

as rain over the magnolia tree.
Or as snow, melting on my tongue.

How close loss is to consumption.
How easy it is to be at fault,

to let him walk those few blocks
to the motel, to the needle. How close

the words negligible and negligent.
How we willfully disregarded

our knowledge that he was on his way,
that the monkey would not leave his back

unless in the open mouth
of a wrathful inferno.

Anna Leonard

Anna Leonard (she/her) is a poet and musician pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is the Lead Media Editor and Associate Podcast Editor for Blackbird and a reader for Yellow Arrow Publishing. Her poems are published or forthcoming in The Florida Review, Southeast Review, Emerge Literary Journal, and elsewhere. She has songs available to stream on all streaming platforms.