For awhile we brush aside all notions of forgiveness, though it wants us badly & makes its case in the meditations. We can't yet imagine an ethos outside of the daily pacts we begged for, fueled on, narcotic, barrel bottom. Say it when we wake up I promise say it at the end of the line, say it again when the sick rises up in our throats at the apparition hour of night. We can't yet imagine ourselves. Who do we pardon for the knee-jerk & repeat, for the restorations when the resources were spent. O we have not lost our lives but all of the materials.
How do we describe the shape of our bodies. Our recovering bodies, our crucial bodies. We are unattributed & so multidirectional. This is a very important time, we are told. The moonflower vines wrap around each other, through the fence, chains in chains. The wide white walks seem built for what's beyond us. Pollen lilts in the narrowing light of the hour, carrying itself to the next receptacle. We suddenly have the desire to speak in long sentences. We have the sun
on our faces & nowhere to go.
Hanna Andrews is the author of Slope Move (Coconut Books) and the Co-Editor of Switchback Books. Her work has appeared in Interim, DIAGRAM, Everyday Genius, and CutBank, among other journals. She currently lives in Las Vegas where she is a PhD candidate at UNLV and a Poetry Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute.