Sara Henning
AUBADE WITH POLAR VORTEX AND WHAT IT MEANS TO SURVIVE YOU
Begin with the shape
your car left in snow
the first night the storm
wouldn’t leave us.
It’s like I took chalk
to the driveway’s gravel,
drew outlines or angels
with the same uncertain
tenderness I’d use
to touch the place
your hair and neck hew
their limits, scatter
into vertebrae: Atlas,
then Axis, the entirety
of your spine’s
scaffolding, like stairs
we once collapsed
onto, so full of wanting
that our body’s borders
rebuked each other,
grew blurry, just as there
is no place now where
concrete and ice
aren’t coupling ruthlessly.
Later, I learned
that salt is the answer
to everything, its grit
the only resolution
for an ice that brutally
clings. You told me
that ice is just water
missing its body while
wishing it gone--
you said this to soothe
me. This afternoon
I watch snow and wind
upbraid each other,
two bodies fighting
while making love,
and the lines between
heave and sunder
are restless, allusive,
and I can’t forgive
either one.
FINDING MY MOTHER’S TAMPONS
I lure each from its hypodermic
sequester, watch it spread like crinoline
when submerged in water,
search for the twine’s node hard
as a keloid scar. Little ghosts, I call them,
as I dry and splay their cotton,
use clear nail polish to vitalize
their sheening. Cashmere espionages
my mother will fling in the trash when
she finds them, so I slip one in my pocket
as proof that no one is exempt
from haunting--not the girl’s body
born with an exact number of eggs,
not my mother’s failed plan to snare my father
with her body. I’ll hang it
from the neighbor’s dogwood tree
in lieu of vigil, learn to call it another dead girl
in a gown, cyme at the center
of a plush bract, wait for butterflies to sup
from her petticoat some auxiliary for sweetness,
not another poisoned bloom.
DEDICATIONS
“They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds
to feed the dead who would come disguised as birds”
–Czeslaw Milosz
Release them--yellow balloons,
for the millions never found.
Release them, for Michelle, restrained
with an extension cord, motorcycle
helmet jammed on her head.
I knew nobody cared about me.
For Amanda bound with duct tape,
chained to a pole in the basement.
For Gina captured in a closet.
I worried what would happen
to me, the other girls.
Dear Lord, the missing people.
Release them, watch it being torn
to the ground
like a house of horrors officials grind
to dust. Castro saying it was wrong to tear down
happy memories. Plastic toilets rarely emptied.
Chains attached to their ankles.
Days never got shorter.
Release them--hidden rooms,
a gun he used. Starved them.
Pushed them down the stairs.
Nights turned into days.
Release them. Michelle aborting
his affidavits, checks cashed in her name.
$22,000 in the washing machine.
Life sentences. Missing children.
Dear Lord, the happy memories.
Release them, the balloons.
Because cranes come smashing.
After 11 years, I am finally being heard--
SCHRODINGER’S CAT, A BILDUNGSROMAN
“At a certain moment for the person who has lost everything, whether that means a being or a country, language
becomes the country. One enters the country of words”
- Helene Cixous, from “The Scene of the unconscious to the Scene of History”
It’s not the confusion of alibis
that makes me drop the textbook,
bolt from the physics classroom.
The cat speaks with its body,
not the atom’s galvanizing hazard,
like the squirrel whose scatter
-hoarded map of acorns bursts
into leaf and lignin, whose hunger
lures her to the dark-eyed junco,
the silky pocket mouse.
How can I focus on more than
one body stunned by entanglement
or paradox ? I’m only syzygy,
slurred lineage. Already a boy
is caught in my heart
like steel or the atom decaying.
Until they open the box
there must be piss, trembling,
the possibility of breathing.
And what’s inside--it knows how to run.
ERASURE WITH STARLINGS AND WHAT WOMEN WON’T TELL YOU
I carry everything I need between my legs.
Women, connected to each other like secrets becoming magnetized.
Why bother with a purse, or terms yet to be transformed?
It’s hard to say what makes this murmuration possible, its uncanny coordination,
its unrevealed biology.
A flock twists over a river. It’s easy for a starling--no desperately shoved details,
no legs crossed over a story that doesn’t end.
Riddle me this. Vaginas make awful flight physiologies.
I need birds operating like neurons --stashed and poised to tip, cutting-edge physics.
Rules turning in unison. You can forget my body.
There’s starlings, hundreds of feet, and what’s beautiful extends beyond birds.
Sara Henning is the author of A Sweeter Water (Lavender Ink, 2013), as well as a chapbook, To Speak of Dahlias (Finishing Line Press, 2012). Her poetry, fiction, interviews and book reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as Willow Springs, Bombay Gin and the Crab Orchard Review. Currently a doctoral student in English and Creative Writing at the University of South Dakota, she serves as Managing Editor for The South Dakota Review.
Return to March 2014 Edition
Begin with the shape
your car left in snow
the first night the storm
wouldn’t leave us.
It’s like I took chalk
to the driveway’s gravel,
drew outlines or angels
with the same uncertain
tenderness I’d use
to touch the place
your hair and neck hew
their limits, scatter
into vertebrae: Atlas,
then Axis, the entirety
of your spine’s
scaffolding, like stairs
we once collapsed
onto, so full of wanting
that our body’s borders
rebuked each other,
grew blurry, just as there
is no place now where
concrete and ice
aren’t coupling ruthlessly.
Later, I learned
that salt is the answer
to everything, its grit
the only resolution
for an ice that brutally
clings. You told me
that ice is just water
missing its body while
wishing it gone--
you said this to soothe
me. This afternoon
I watch snow and wind
upbraid each other,
two bodies fighting
while making love,
and the lines between
heave and sunder
are restless, allusive,
and I can’t forgive
either one.
FINDING MY MOTHER’S TAMPONS
I lure each from its hypodermic
sequester, watch it spread like crinoline
when submerged in water,
search for the twine’s node hard
as a keloid scar. Little ghosts, I call them,
as I dry and splay their cotton,
use clear nail polish to vitalize
their sheening. Cashmere espionages
my mother will fling in the trash when
she finds them, so I slip one in my pocket
as proof that no one is exempt
from haunting--not the girl’s body
born with an exact number of eggs,
not my mother’s failed plan to snare my father
with her body. I’ll hang it
from the neighbor’s dogwood tree
in lieu of vigil, learn to call it another dead girl
in a gown, cyme at the center
of a plush bract, wait for butterflies to sup
from her petticoat some auxiliary for sweetness,
not another poisoned bloom.
DEDICATIONS
“They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds
to feed the dead who would come disguised as birds”
–Czeslaw Milosz
Release them--yellow balloons,
for the millions never found.
Release them, for Michelle, restrained
with an extension cord, motorcycle
helmet jammed on her head.
I knew nobody cared about me.
For Amanda bound with duct tape,
chained to a pole in the basement.
For Gina captured in a closet.
I worried what would happen
to me, the other girls.
Dear Lord, the missing people.
Release them, watch it being torn
to the ground
like a house of horrors officials grind
to dust. Castro saying it was wrong to tear down
happy memories. Plastic toilets rarely emptied.
Chains attached to their ankles.
Days never got shorter.
Release them--hidden rooms,
a gun he used. Starved them.
Pushed them down the stairs.
Nights turned into days.
Release them. Michelle aborting
his affidavits, checks cashed in her name.
$22,000 in the washing machine.
Life sentences. Missing children.
Dear Lord, the happy memories.
Release them, the balloons.
Because cranes come smashing.
After 11 years, I am finally being heard--
SCHRODINGER’S CAT, A BILDUNGSROMAN
“At a certain moment for the person who has lost everything, whether that means a being or a country, language
becomes the country. One enters the country of words”
- Helene Cixous, from “The Scene of the unconscious to the Scene of History”
It’s not the confusion of alibis
that makes me drop the textbook,
bolt from the physics classroom.
The cat speaks with its body,
not the atom’s galvanizing hazard,
like the squirrel whose scatter
-hoarded map of acorns bursts
into leaf and lignin, whose hunger
lures her to the dark-eyed junco,
the silky pocket mouse.
How can I focus on more than
one body stunned by entanglement
or paradox ? I’m only syzygy,
slurred lineage. Already a boy
is caught in my heart
like steel or the atom decaying.
Until they open the box
there must be piss, trembling,
the possibility of breathing.
And what’s inside--it knows how to run.
ERASURE WITH STARLINGS AND WHAT WOMEN WON’T TELL YOU
I carry everything I need between my legs.
Women, connected to each other like secrets becoming magnetized.
Why bother with a purse, or terms yet to be transformed?
It’s hard to say what makes this murmuration possible, its uncanny coordination,
its unrevealed biology.
A flock twists over a river. It’s easy for a starling--no desperately shoved details,
no legs crossed over a story that doesn’t end.
Riddle me this. Vaginas make awful flight physiologies.
I need birds operating like neurons --stashed and poised to tip, cutting-edge physics.
Rules turning in unison. You can forget my body.
There’s starlings, hundreds of feet, and what’s beautiful extends beyond birds.
Sara Henning is the author of A Sweeter Water (Lavender Ink, 2013), as well as a chapbook, To Speak of Dahlias (Finishing Line Press, 2012). Her poetry, fiction, interviews and book reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as Willow Springs, Bombay Gin and the Crab Orchard Review. Currently a doctoral student in English and Creative Writing at the University of South Dakota, she serves as Managing Editor for The South Dakota Review.
Return to March 2014 Edition