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.