Hannah Bonner
Object of Vision
In the beginning,
I wanted to be looked at
like fire,
anywhere it is.
Sometimes, I pulled my mouth
down, sometimes up,
always in dim light, split
and tapered.
Eyes made an orifice of me,
and a metonym,
murmuring, outline, apple,
open.
Gradually, the incurring emptiness rose
like heat,
straight to the center
of nothing.
Archaeology
The moon lays down
her lantern at my feet
against the ancient fossils.
Fern, tooth, snail
of seas no longer here,
I remember
mineral landscapes,
tented waves,
swallowing stone and light.
The visible succumbs
to alteration.
The alteration is history –
this in which
now all at once
folds back
the wild grasses.
The Ordering of Narrative
Your life doesn’t belong just to you,
you said.
But for a while, I reply,
it did.
Supernova
Thrust of stars
and a horse spooked by fire,
besieged by the sun
blacking out.
The earth turns
and hangs upon nothing.
Feelings, what are those?
There’s no going
back.