In the car
on the bridge
in the fog
that holds the city like time
made thick and visible
In the week before my children
begin school
in the trenches of my beloved friend’s
heartbreak
I think of how we cannot contain
ourselves
How in being here longer
we get brittler and more permeable
narrative passing and dispersing through us
atomized
oil and fragrance spraying from the skin
of a clementine being opened
If only I could smell like a clementine
being peeled nearly whole
coating the hands of my peeler with the memory
of the taste
Blood orange
Satsuma
Tangerine
This is the story I chase through perfume
The story I try to claim as my own
That what is bitter can be removed cleanly
That there is sweetness in being undone
In the crisp air of the open window
in the chill of August
that my mind brays at
behind our masks that hold our breath in close
on Saturday morning
in the year two thousand and twenty one two three four five
on the burning fraying rock
that has nowhere to run from its own destruction
I claim this enclave for a beige mug of coffee
I claim this corner seat and friendship
Those trees
mine
and these thickened palms
craning their necks over the pathway here
watching us walk beneath them in arboreal kindly detachment
Their gossip sounds like
the ocean going psssssh
Yesterday on the windblown beach
we watched a man and woman posing
for wedding photographs
looking out over the waves
White dress and veil and hair and bouquet and sand wild around them
a dust devil
The photographer yelled over the wind and water to the bride
Turn this way! Let your flowers drop!
Veronica, let the flowers drop!
And as she looked back toward the beach
toward the camera
away from the water
and lowered the flowers
the wind
the light
the veil
composed themselves around her in an instant
Let them drop, Veronica
That’s it
Turn and face the wind
This poem first appeared in Tempest: Poems for Earthly Renewal (Greenfish Press, 2022).
—
Hannah Stephenson is the author of Cadence (winner of the 2016 Ohio Chapbook Prize from the Wick Poetry Center) and In the Kettle, the Shriek. She also served as series co-editor for New Poetry from the Midwest (in 2014, 2017, and 2019). Her writing has appeared in publications that include The Atlantic, The Huffington Post, 32 Poems, SWWIM, The Journal, Verse Daily, and Poetry Daily.
