It's Not How We Leave One's life & Shaving & Like
Abigail J. Hansel
It's not how we leave one's life
In a cave called
my body I spool out
this larval cairn:
an ink spoilt long-limbed
loveliness-ness, togetherness
bonded in total dark.
My grandmother stands,
is standing, at the edge of her cluttered
heaped basement and saying
“Under all this is an antique
mahogany table” I’ve never seen
it but I believe her.
In our shared mind I sit at it
and clay pigeons hurl from
my throat, landing safe unshot in
the field. You never know when it’s going to
happen, but when it does it will. You won’t be ready,
love the curdled limbslackener will
walk on you like a tight rope, the stones will
etch themselves into the overhang of
tree, and in a cave called my body
you will make a word
called forgetting—
marveling at its perfect infrastructure.
Shaving
Blood
has echoes
One is caught in
my neck. See it for
me.
My eyes don’t go
Down that far.
It writhes: is
the word writh
It makes it by
Being it. And when
I release through the
cut: a turning:
A top balanced on
a bouquet of feathers
It blooms and blooms
like all that living sound
At the bottom of the river.
Like
the light, it’s like marmalade
To me, and I hope to everyone.
A man told me once that any
simile could be a metaphor,
any simile would be better off if it was just a metaphor
if that like slinked away and became a river drowning
in another river.
I don’t believe him. I think that’s bullshit. I’m like a
sun. I am like the dark loam. I’m like the foam after
Uranus’s testicles plop in the ocean.
It’s February and I’m at the end of my
rope. I told J- on the phone
“I just feel so lesbian all of the time”
I tried to watch a movie to feel better
but there was a cute girl in the movie and her character
was really lonely and I cried. I hate it when
girls are lonely. I could be their friend I could
be like a coral reef, something for life to live on.
I just want one kiss / I just want to write one
good poem. This isn’t it. Like or as.
I am like a woman. I am like my mother. I am like my grandmother
silver fish scuttling in the whites of the eye.
I keep a picture of the golden wheat fields
folded in the wallet of my mind. Did religion start because
there needed to be someone to bless the wheat? I remember a man
in a class saying that once. I don’t know if that’s true.
I think religion started because God wanted it to.
Or because a mother
had a sadness she didn’t want to die.
Abigail J. Hansel is a poet & transsexual woman from Idaho. She is currently pursuing a degree in creative writing from the University of Idaho. Her hobbies include staring at piles of dirt, reckoning with the expanse, and searching for secret things.
These poems contend with grief, or the prefiguring of it, both within and outside the body, the extent of family, language, image, and the slipperiness of trans personal narrative.