By Hannah Craig
This Year
this year tried to grow the right
heirloom, off-center
a mistake
in the root system
fawn lilies & toothwort
tried to fail
at bounded beds at hedge-hearth
at feeding & pruning
let everything go
everything go
but it is as the world remembered
opened its purple eye
tulips came anyway
the iris too
birds feasting
with their beautiful beaks
to say i swallowed it
is melodrama
but the pollen coursed
on the river of breath
the spider thread
in my chest
and what grows here
a spongy moss, cuneiform
untidy
purling its weak-kneed hooks
into me into me
this year tried not to care
//
this looks like joy
you joke
//
soap the backs
of your hands
six seven
seconds, scald
this looks like
how you clean yourself
after a man tells you
after a whisper
puts you in hell
go back there
bite harder
this looks like deliverance
now you get
to tell your story
o wait no
One Day Put the Money Back, Next Day Borrow it Again
Storm last night stripped the maples / as if they were women / did not ask / as if they were / well, you found a five dollar bill under the nightstand / the fog blur / like a green cataract / this form of coaxing I cannot understand / touching-but-not-touching / an animal loose in our throats / scrabbling in us both / pay now pay later / never wanted to live next door to the landlord, didn’t want him coming in / to see how things were going / the broken light hanging from the ceiling, a jagged bowl of ceramic & the pale belly of exposed light bulb / well it looked like a definition / the way we could live if we were human / and another, another way, a better / water softener, a better matchstick / a way we could live if we were healthy / if we never needed the urgent care / or the urge to kick the house down / it would fall / in rhythm with a bigger disaster.
Finding the Fox Skeleton
Quicklime, ink, & charcoal,
the day's lines sink & dry.
I can't mourn for your dead, not the way
you mourn not that
anything we mourn is contained
in a closed loop.
The rain puffs out its sleeves & feathers.
If you want to keep control
hold the inside loop of your voice
hold it until the rain saturates the ragged hillside
the sidewalk broken, grooved, yearling birches
fallen, moving the bridge away.
Maybe we saw the dead early
& our lives stayed that way.
Still sometimes the body.
Sometimes lying down.
The flat obligation.
To talk with iron lips & jaws but cotton teeth.
To blaspheme in a world of walls, you
don't need to build a bridge, just cross one.
Hannah Craig lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She is the author of This History that Just Happened (Parlor Press, 2017). Her work has recently appeared in journals like Copper Nickel, Occulum, Mississippi Review, and the New England Review of Books.