Issue #7 July 2016
Detail from Dangling by Amy Casey

Hannah Larrabee

New Moon

I read the last poems
of Jim Harrison, sitcom
laughter spilling in from
the other room. The tail
of my cat flicks with every
surge. He can't sleep.
I can't read. Inaudible.
Laughter. Pause. Laughter.

Last night I walked alone
and the moon was nowhere
but in the same place.
I walked and walked without
light and stood to listen
to the breathing of horses
asleep upright
in an even darker barn.

Mandolin Busker

On the train, the mandolin sound is discarded
like a cigarette smoking itself on the curb.
What can be said of nothingness can be said
of everything busy and lonely. The world rots
away like apples in the fall. I bloody the inside
of my mouth with worry. Buskers and Salvation
Army bells, everyone is wanting, everyone
is earthly. But I can feel every fiber of myself
being pulled up toward sky, and behind sky,
darkness, and behind darkness I am reassembled,
I am the deer standing head bowed at the fruit,
light-years away from what was once a painful
human longing, a hunger I carried like a backpack
into the woods and never returned.

On Earth

We will be inheriting soon
real reality, all
the peace of the universe:
unending night and the still hugely nameless
majority of the stars. – Franz Wright

I’ve read that the light of stars slows considerably
in water, trapped there, nothing but reflection.
It gives us a chance, on earth, to see them.

Now when a loon calls from an obsidian lake,
I think of you. How you were always looking
into the mouth of things.

When a trout is lifted from water, the universe
is lonesome. I wonder — is it peaceful, out there,
in all that is unending?

On earth, I am left to believe that at the outskirts,
in red, we are loved.