POETRY

Runner-Up for the 2024 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize Honoring Jake Adam York

So Tell Me How It Ends

By Andrew Hemmert     VOLUME 57 No. 3

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But stars aren’t cold, no matter the distance, no matter what
we want to believe. The coldest one we’ve yet found is still
warmer than a cup of coffee left sitting for a minute.
There’s an iceberg frigidity we inject into our gods--
something like the Arctic Ocean, something like a parade
of the dismembered bodies of glaciers. I remember
seeing the scattering fleets of ice and thinking churches
floating out into space. So hello universe! My name
is temporary and my bones are made of you, you
with your far mountaining nebulas, you with your fires
that have shown us the way, that show us how there is no way
except where we already dream of going. October
and the nights are growing cold. October and the nights
are full of stars saying there is nowhere left to go.



The stars say there is nowhere left to go but up, and it’s clear
I will never see them. Not in the science fiction sense--
not on a space walk, not from the bridge of a gleaming ship.
The captains of such vessels will be required to ride
into the mouths of black holes as their crews and passengers
escape on pods, though where to escape to? That far from home,
the only hope is the slow deprivation of oxygen
or the polite smothering in one’s sleep by cannibals.
Meanwhile the captain is molecular spaghetti.
That’s what they call it, spaghettification, when the tides
of a black hole get hold of you. And meanwhile
the only place in the universe where pasta exists
is right here on Earth, so why leave? Americans want
a frontier for a frontier’s sake, smothered by their lives.



A frontier is a smothering lie, an othering
some pray to. Even distant Alaska now has Walmarts,
but Americans in droves go there with their guns and bunkers,
pretending they’ll alone survive whatever future
stalks outside the cabin door like a dog or a flood
or a fire. In winter, Alaska is colder than the stars,
though not colder than the moon. Americans love to pretend
they’ll escape the future, though they are the future, a horde
of cowboy preachers rodeoing pump jacks and hiding
their wounds and dragging the world down with them. Each one a wound.
Each one a jukebox left on in a small town’s only bar,
and you can’t quite make out the singer, but the song is old
enough to never forget. It cloys, it claws, it insists
it is the only song. Cover of an older, rotten tune.



Some songs think they’re the only songs. Some rotten houses
stand only by the grace of brick and spite, some neighborhoods
are inhabited only by bats and stray dogs and lizards.
In Florida, those empty suburbs opened like sinkholes
on the edges of interstates, half-built, an emptiness
you could put your hand to the wall of, you could walk inside of
and see the needles scattering the floors and see the shapes
spray-painted in lifeless living rooms. Penises, anarchy,
who would now live here? Here where the dying Everglades
were a little more destroyed to make room for America.
And what was the metaphor, something as innocuous
as a scented soap bubble bursting full of a kid’s breath,
full of that milk-foul dream of America no kid
could know they were being blown into like glass, day by day.



So the days are blown from our lives like shingles off houses.
Watching Hurricane Ian arrive on the TV screen
halfway across the country, I could feel a kind of black hole
at the heart of the hurricane, meaning senseless, meaning
consuming. The spaghetti chart, absurd name, predicting
various options for destruction. I imagined Florida
as St. Sebastian, each path a rope strung through the body
where an arrow used to be. And it was arrows poisoned
with manchineel fruit that killed Ponce de León, killer
from across the ocean, who deserved to rot where he fell
and feed the ghost crabs with their translucent mandibles
and feed the laughing gulls with their tattered-shipwreck-sail wings.
In St. Augustine, I drank from the Fountain of Youth. Wish me luck,
the woman who first sold that water died wrapped around a tree.





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TO READ MORE FROM THIS POEM, PICK UP A COPY OF VOL 57 No. 3




ANDREW HEMMERT is the author of Blessing the Exoskeleton (University of Pittsburgh Press) and Sawgrass Sky (Texas Review Press). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in various magazines including The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, The Kenyon Review, and The Southern Review. He earned his MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and currently lives in Thornton, CO.


VOLUME 57 No. 3