Three Poems
Sundays
Boys pressing their shirts because mothers.
All I ever wanted
was no cruelty.
Now the brain become a dish
that sorry eats up.
I’ve put three gashes in my side—
out comes oil, milk, more oil.
I need no clothes.
Sleep
will be my river.
The earth, it makes a mighty smell. People:
sweet and funny
rotting things.
I have to love
those rotting things;
look at mirrors, windows, ponds,
saying Hannah,
you’re a scooped-up animal.
Rescue,
here I come.
But where can go
my little shoes,
crying like a choke
on something?
Shut up, snotty babies,
Hannah needs her heart fall out
and sleep under some cold rock/ tree.
Casa Grande
At the Casa Grande disco, men hold on
to other men’s behinds, and women
hold on to men’s behinds,
and everyone is holding on
to what it means to be dancing
and holding on, and I am there
too, doing the two things
I am always doing:
holding on, and drinking enough
water so that tomorrow I’ll be able
to document all the things humans do
to endear themselves to me, conscious
of how dancing means that the music
will bring them closer,
and take them further away.
Biotic/ Abiotic
This is the movement
a poem makes: a trash bag
breaking and breaking
until a brilliant red pear
falls out, whole and un-
troubled-- how did that
happen? You moved around
me like a plastic daisy
on a plastic stem, spinning
in yardwind. We never really
got it together. I think you prefer
astronomy because how far away
everything is is exactly
the order of things. I prefer poems,
but I understand that their human smell
is often troubling. The lack of this
is another good thing
about star's dying, I guess.
Hannah Gamble
Poems originally published in the book Your Invitation to a Modest Breakfast, by Hannah Gamble, selected by Bernadette Mayer for the National Poetry Series, and published by Fence Books.
