Hannah Marshall
Photo by Michael Ragsdale
Hannah Marshall lives in south-central Illinois, where she works as the advising editor for Greenville University's literary journal, The Scriblerus, and as the poetry editor for South 85. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Daily, New Ohio Review, Anglican Theological Review, The Madison Review, and others. She received her MFA in creative writing from Converse College.
Even This Fragiility
That my hand
reaches out and touches the textured cotton
of the quilt, or smooths
my daughter’s hair into a pony tail,
or palms the cold skin
of a green pumpkin. Even the tenderness
of the page, its thin promises, or the soft
tissue of the eye,
can hold all wonder and horror
in its white stare. And the sky,
so filled with anger and our hurry,
can still nourish the lemon-colored
dahlias—big as toddlers’ skulls—
into late bloom. Even
though all our hands and eyes and skulls
fall into shade and detritus, even now,
the maple leaves, the sweet gums,
drain of chlorophyll
to sweep the periphery of our days
into a harvest of crimson. Even now the infant’s heart
beats, though it becomes clear
that something is terribly wrong,
as his lungs fill with fluid, as he
is life flighted to St. Louis,
wrapped in light and tubing and metal,
but even still his diaphragm prods at his lungs
in frantic bursts, his heart goes on
even as we go on
putting cheerful scarecrows on the porch or mantle,
buying bulky bags of Halloween candy,
surfing Amazon.com for a costume
or a new Bluetooth speaker. Even this
small aliveness—a future where we imagine
the need for a new speaker—
keeps us clinging to our breath,
but dimming, like the nub of eraser
on a pencil, retracing each word on the line.
©2020 West Trade Review
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