Cathryn Hankla

Blinded by a chance at permanence,
via satellite I watch a sliver
of Alaskan sun,
wishing darkness could bloom.
...

Painted arrows far below the tenth floor
Point right across the bridges.
Outside Mother's hos­pi­tal win­dow
A bliz­zard blots the soc­cer fields.
...

With no adorn­ment allowed
In surgery, I'm wear­ing two watches.
The first watch is Mother's on a plain leather band.
...

Out of dusky silence and staggering
Time, from a swollen afternoon
Of elevated leg and painkillers,
...

The moon comes up like an almond
And down like an orange.
It wasn't the moon, but the mountain.
The moonfish has a face that ends
...

Each Sunday with the snips
A tin pail half of water
Half of garden blooms
...

I cripple some ants.
I don't mean to, but I do.
Others I squash flat
...

The possibility of saying something becomes more difficult.
The urgency
Of saying nothing rings the ears. Moving
...

There's something I have to tell you. Sorry,
I said,
But I do. It won't take forever, but it's important.
...

The girl floats down the country road-oh how the
glorious cows and pretty horses roam and graze. The girl
wanders past, daydreaming in the pastoral setting, the
icing on the cake she's eating every day. She's thinking
...

Painted letters drip red. "P" provides
an awkward sickle tacked to a stalk.
If we found canned peaches for sale
...

A redheaded woodpecker
works a sycamore upside down,
quinto looking for a conga,
a confutation on a wet October day.
...

Dragging the ghost of the trees in my tarp, I look to stripped limbs'
jagged outlines against a clouded atmosphere.
My heavy-lidded day smells of mold and leaves slick with rot.
I should leave rumination alone, but I remember
...

"The worst insult in my thirty years,"
the teacher said. Arms flapping,
she turned from the board
...

Green leaves, water starved, clatter to red clay;
churned by hiking tread and horseshoes,
luck turned in all directions
forms a subtext marked by rich dung.
...

The father and the mother were neither smiling nor alone.
And their children were not at home.
...

Exhumed from a dripping cave
still in formation,
sealed in clay jars,
...

A sky-gazing child, intrigued
by constellations and stormy weather,
tornadoes and ripe tomatoes,
Lisa announced over fruit loops
...

If clouds clear before dawn, we'll see remnants of Halley's
dust ripping the sky.
...

The world: glass, swirls of color, irregular sine waves so distinctly interwoven that to wonder at the hard surface was to miss the liquid nature of the internal construction. I hardly knew you, yet I gave you this world, a world
...