"Pillar" and "The Bluff to Which We Sang"

Poetry by Hannah Darling Fenn

Pillar

Exoskeletons littered our yard
The day I touched my
Tongue to the roof of my mouth
And called victory.
They moved me in heaps
From one pillar to another.
My shoes fit better then
And the skies emptied
Like power right into
Our tiny open palms.

It was a bit like when
My son laid on my lap, cried.
Asked me to write his name
On his own hands.
We all must have some memory of that-
The ritual of being called holy.

The Bluff to Which We Sang

The ancient future holds us dear
In its little itinerary.
It hums along our hay fire,
Singing rain, please
Breathe with us.

It’s my favorite ghost story-
The way the land hasn’t
Given us signal to leave.
And we start to become plains
And he starts to wear work boots
And I wonder if everything has
Crawled its way home at some point
And felt the forgiving earth
Soften under elbows.

Hannah Darling Fenn is a Pacific Northwest poet and mother residing in Wisconsin. In her work, she experiments with surrealist poetry born from meditative states and the natural world. Her poems have appeared in Wend, Terrible Orange Review, and Cordella Magazine.