Thrush Poetry Journal
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Shannon Elizabeth Hardwick

After Isadore

South Carolina flooded─the plantation

shook its magnolias under ten feet

of water. The unconscious lies 

in its symbols. I remember standing─no,

flying over rows of slaves or salvaged

cranes. Somehow it didn’t matter 

which─I was dreaming.




A Week Before Isadore

New Orleans’ oleanders &
beginning rain near Saint Louis
Cathedral, a horse reared & 

I, too, a saint. That year
His Feast Day fell on her 
Abortion Day: late August.

Louis, the blues & blur, not yet
aware you were there or
where I was going.




Rude Boys Walking Home

This poem isn’t born yet, or it is
into a field in Coventry, into rude boys

walking home after dark wanting the mystery
to open inside hedges, their mother’s strangeness,

father’s unanswered call to ministry, drowned,
a wounded duck, in the back pond, neck tied

with rope. This poem isn’t born into humanthings,
strange smell of muck and bone–or the sailor

walking home from the baker with two loaves,
carnations, an onion for the pie and his wife

with another man tearing flakes off herself,
the past in pieces, where the rude boys hurt

the body of a girl inside the hedgerow, delicate
like so many ducks around the wounded one,

until finally, her mate plucks her, pale, out of it
as gods do in marriages or the drunk lying in a lake

after falling too far to catch his pain, whisked
into the nodded rape of being too long in the body.




Shannon Elizabeth Hardwick received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She has been nominated for a Best New Poets and her manuscript was a finalist for the Levis Prize in Poetry.  Hardwick’s chapbook, Hummingbird Mind, is available through Mouthfeel Press and she is an associate poetry editor for The Boiler Journal. Her work has appeared in the following: 3:AM Magazine, Night Train, Versal,Sugar House Review, Four Way Review, among others. She writes in the deserts of West Texas.




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