In the box I forgot to tell you existed
Now under your bed is a heron skeleton
experiments in bone for making offerings
for sleep, wings bent back, dried
what the brain does to itself, gone
not but having turned her wings upright
break and head tilted to previously
detected sun, dried in time to see
the sleep of the birds, offering sleep.
Geometries
The octagon on its hind
spider legs leans back from
its stairs, gazes down into
the valley, a novice before
a painting knowing
only what he likes
in the easiest of ways, the real
liking comes after the real knowing
of Kinloch’s poet-window, the bent
words hanging out over his fabricated
city but as my uncle said of a man
at the railroad he has one year
of experience 27 times and this water
tower has one year of experience
over and over through seasons
with buggies, then cars, now bikes
and futile hikers who cannot
see what it sees and who
cannot imagine the nimble art
of looking and looking again.
Hannah Star Rogers holds a PhD from Cornell University and an MFA from Columbia University. She is currently a fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude Fellowship in Stuttgart, Germany and a Visiting Scholar in Creative Writing at Strathclyde University. Her poems and reviews have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Boston Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Tupelo Quarterly, The Carolina Quarterly, and TSR. Exo-Sanctuaries, a collection of her ekphrastic poems and the art they are based on is forthcoming from Perennial Press in 2020. Dr. Rogers has received the Djerassi Artist Residency in Woodside, CA, the international artist residencies at ArtHub in Kingman, AZ, the Arctic Circle in Finland, as well as residencies with the National Park Service in Acadia, Maine and the Everglades, FL.
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