Featured Poet: March 2009 Vol. 1 #5
Hannah K. New
Hannah K. New is currently a grad student at Southern Illinois University studying poetry. She has participated in several readings and won several awards over the last several years. She has published two chapbooks: Voices From the Second Floor (self-published with several poets 2005) and Fighting Nature (published by the National Federation of State Poetry Societies 2006). The National Federation of State Poetry societies awarded her the Florence Kahn Memorial Award in 2006 and she traveled to San Antonio to present her poetry at its annual conference. Hannah has presented papers and poetry at the National Undergraduate Literary Conference in 2005 and 2006. She has also published several non-fiction articles in various magazines.
Proving My Uncle Wrong
“Watering horses can’t be a poem,”
you said one night when I defended
the idea that everything is poetry.
I leave the house, snow filling my boots
and soaking my socks. I pour the cool water,
a fluid arc, into the buckets. Two mares
move their necks like swans, straightening
and then curving. I imagine they are playing
a game of Catch Me if You Can standing still.
A colt follows me and rests his nose against my back.
We both take comfort from the warmth of togetherness.
I get caught up in the rhythm of pulling the hose
and rolling it into perfect O’s to hang on the hook:
pull and hook, pull and hook.
The natural flow of routine runs through me
and satisfies me as neatly as water filling the red, plastic buckets.
And you—you tried to argue with me
that watering horses can’t be a poem.
Ice Storms in June
He labeled the horse’s breath, Sweet hay of the Earth.
He labeled my eyes, doubled curse—see-saw.
The horse was blind in one eye, saw with his muzzle.
To my mouth, he burned with coals.
I will scar your forehead with my breath.
I will singe your hand with touch.
To baptize you with blood would be cliché,
so I will use the sweat of horses,
and the melted ice of winter storms in June.
Ode to Cell Phones and Testicles
My husband says I must introduce the piece of
metallic shit as my third generation, excellent reception,
brick of a phone. It was his mother’s, and he passes
it to me as lovingly as my Grandmother gave me her
silver spoon. I hold it, until I feel the heartbeat,
the electric skip that I am sure is giving me brain cancer
as surely as the plastic basketball hoops on an assembly line
in Ogden, Utah gave my husband his gift of a testicle.
This testicle does NOT receive reception. At least
not anymore. And for some reason neither does his
remaining one. I dial, but no one answers. And what
is with testicles nowadays? We will all be sterile in a few years.
The rivers are full of birth control pills, estrogen slipping into
seminiferous tubes, taking up residence in the warm male ovaries of heat.
And climate change now, too. Warming the testes until it is too hot
for tadpoles or for sperm. I would throw my cell phone into the river,
but I am afraid of what my husband will gift me with next.