POETRY

Be Small

By Constance Hansen     VOLUME 55.2

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You can too pin down a wave
with a barrette.

My mother’s fingers
worming through my hair,

fixing me up for a picture.
The haystack in the needle’s eye

is a rock in Oregon. Look
into the light sliver:

See the seagulls, the barnacles?
There, the brunette

with the bones?
That is my mother.

I have her tomato—
it is a pincushion.

The possessions of the dead
are talismans, no matter

how common. Common
as lovers shrugging

love is a letting go.
Why do they speak

like hospice chaplains?
Common as migraines.

If you trespass that buzzing
auric hurt, the fluorescent

lights that harden hospital
corridors against tailing

ponies, please hush.
If it’s love, leave me,

then, in gentleness.
If it’s love, be smaller

than the scene inside
the sugar egg I dropped

at Emmanuel Preschool
show & tell. If truly

time is collapsed into one
seamless acorn,

they take their tea to this day,
the mother rabbit in calico

& her straight-eared, pinafored
babies viewable through

a pink-frosted
cottage window.

And me, inconsolable,
and my mother consoling me

that people are so much more
important than things.

If so, someone take
this vegetal fruit from me--

is it stuffed with lead? Perhaps
if we loosen the green ribbon,

as in the Victorian
ghost story, it will fall

with a neat little thud and roll
to someone else’s feet.



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CONSTANCE HANSEN’s poetry and reviews have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Four Way Review, Harvard Review, River Mouth Review, EcoTheo Review, Volume Poetry, Psaltery & Lyre, and Moist Poetry Journal. She is the assistant managing editor of Poetry Northwest and a contributing writer at Currently. She lives in Seattle with her family, where she teaches poetry at Hugo House.


VOLUME 55.2