POETRY

A Visitor Says Things Are Rotting in Durham, NC

By Hannah VanderHart     VOLUME 52.3
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We are mostly the humidity. Our politics, the humidity.
The reason we drink on porches and the labor inequities
we watch like deer in the woods: humidity. In the summer,
the scent of shade by the house. The hostas growing there.
Moss between bricks. A dampness of loam and the lip
of the water table, our yards dipping beneath it. Mosquitos
singing to their children. Everything at the edge of ponds.
Newt and frog eggs. Our shoes and sticks. My child hallooing
into the depths. His uncle taking him out in the rowboat
without asking, without a life jacket. My brother not a sailor.
We swam that sullen pond once, in desperate summer—rose
​steaming, each hair covered in silt, more dirty than before.


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HANNAH VANDERHART lives in Durham, NC. She has poetry and reviews published and forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, and Poetry Northwest. Her book, What Pecan Light, is forthcoming from Bull City Press, and she is the reviews editor at EcoTheo Review. More at hannahvanderhart.com.


VOLUME 52.3