Three Poems by M. Ann Hull

This Isn’t An Era for Adoring

the unborn fingers of a tea cup
gripping to its chipped brim
brittle stembones shedding petals
like a dry red rain. Thick, thicketed
romances & tiny eyelid-licking
glances were for the timid & the timid
have all gone, leaving bridges scrubbing
starlight from their steel. I could tell
my unborn daughter there was a time
when a hand placed in a hand had a language
which was telling & didn’t talk. I could
tell her poets used to line up, block-long,
to take turns breathing into bellied-up
crows whose breath didn’t taste like rust
in tin can telephone secrets passed
between the younger & still young.
We used to all want the song to end
up aging into a door that wouldn’t shut.
We used to all want the same gray
epiphanies to garden under two left
thumbs, but now it seems to be enough
to push a prism’s spectrumed waist
up to the window glass to fuck.

House of Echoes

The yard is opening itself. She won’t
answer the door. The dandelions
are deaf. The yard fills every year.
He undoes his belt. Their name
means lion tooth. She won’t answer
the door. Their heads split into seeds.
You breathe them in and choke.
Where is the beast who bites? She
won’t answer the door. You can knock
and knock. Your knuckles can bleed.
The yard fills up as before. The house
has come undone. We don’t know if
she sleeps. The dandelions are numb.

Elegy for a Mason Jar

There isn’t time for canned magic.
The wings that once beat bodies
against the curves inside your shoulders
have been battered, fluttered & gone
flat. The little stars that shone inside
you cannot blink to mock the night.
In a dream, you were a wet balloon
blown into the shape of a hummingbird
threatening to break with any sign of flit.
In another, you were lifted until the pregnant
cloud seemed to sit inside your belly. Now,
there’s just a list of what won’t grow
inside you growing: no collection of shiny
pennies, their lilting clink, not a berry
ripened to burst its bittersweet jam.
Your lid’s been twisted like a bulb’s
bottom until you burn out. Only
a widow tries to spin her sticky home
in you & finds your curves keep causing
rooms & roofs to lose their grip.

M. Ann Hull has published work in 32 Poems, Barrow Street, BOXCAR Poetry Review, Fugue, Mid-American Review, Passages North, and Quarterly West, among others, and has been awarded the Academy of American Poets Prize. A former poetry editor of Black Warrior Review, she holds an MFA from the University of Alabama.

Image: wiselywoven, morguefile.com

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