Say Not Yet
Sometimes / pretend to be
the last thing I need /which one of us is the man / (neither) / which one of us
is good / (my tongue doesn’t know) / Sometimes pretend you’re rope / sometimes
the hammer // there’s a clearing / painting targets on our backs / with elm sap
/ ( If we saw a visual of how trees talk / we’d never speak again) / Sometimes
/be the last thing I need /say not yet / which is different than no // say boy
you are the barnacle / wedded to the world / I will not fail / to dislodge you
Say / be the landscape /
I’m chipping away / to surrender your center // Sometimes / be the last / I’ll
ever need / say not yet / your germs on my germs / (we’ll never speak again)
Thickly Settled II
I think you’re protecting him,
you tell the baby flounder
pancaking a minnow. I swallow,
lit from a weed gummy,
which keeps me from saying,
he’s eating him,
he’s eating him.
We leave the visitor center
for the marsh trail; I’m
a ball of light, every yellow reed
grows me.
You don’t kiss me
on the bridge where
the children could see. You don’t
kiss me in the woods either.
In the wild, I thickly settle—
fiddler crab with his sand pit,
his distended claw.
Why don’t you ever fucking relax?
I ask, holding a whelk;
I ask, holding a whelk;
a father instructs his son to
shake
one and the snail will come out.
Sometimes it’s so easy to guess
who the bad people are, you tell
the water I wade further into.
I plant my feet
so the sand and fish will eat them.
Lily-Livered is
the Inheritance
I
want to tell her I’m sorry, that the knife becomes reddest
when
possibility enters the field—again—dripping like horses
chewed
by the moon until their fur gleams
with
tartar. I want to tell her sorry became
the knife—
pressed
to my stubble, my stubble the possible field.
Please,
a horse dies to make me what I am,
the
foam on his muscles, the foam in my lungs remembers the moon
needs
my liver watered. Please, I want to tell her, I’ll stay
alive
just enough, anchored by the bit in my mouth, drinking anyway,
always
drinking.
Wren Hanks is the
author of The Rise of Genderqueer, a 2018 selection for Brain Mill
Press's Mineral Point Poetry Series. A 2016 Lambda Literary Emerging Writers
Fellow, his poetry has been a finalist for Indiana Review's 1/2 K Prize
and anthologized in Best New Poets. His recent work appears in Indiana
Review, New South, Waxwing, and elsewhere. He is also the
author of Prophet Fever (Hyacinth Girl Press), an Elgin Award finalist.
He lives in Brooklyn, where he works as a coordinator for Animal Care Center of
NYC's New Hope program, a proactive community initiative that finds homes for
pets (and wildlife) in need.