Featured Poet: Emily Lake Hansen

      perfect day dream CC



​Still Life

Morning and the clocks have changed
and our sons talk apocalyptic - which way
would you pick to die? The kitchen table
invaded by monsters. Things are noisy
and it’s still not dawn. Outside birds awake
and I try to name them: wren and robin,
cardinal and finch, all early morning flit
and chatter. I grew up in quieter houses -
only the din of tv, the humming Santa Anna,
suppers with vegetables steamed of sound.
I crunched ice between my teeth instead
when I wanted something loud. What
I controlled then the same as what
I control now    - nothing -
                and we’re late for school
as always, my keys rattling in the lock.
In the car, there’s an argument: zombies
or daggers. I pick falling houses, the wicked
witch crushed under the foundation.




Inheritance

In the new country, my grandmother
and her sisters carried their heads
like anchors, woven canisters meant
for immeasurable grain. One married
a different man for every decade of her life.
One’s brain got erased by waves. One
wore a doll strapped to her chest for years
and years like a baby. My grandmother
planted flowers instead: zinnias and azaleas,
white magnolias snipped from trees.
She called them out by color, standing
in her nightgown in the daylight, her hands
perched like birds on her round hips.
She was sturdy in those moments,
a fat statue on her Florida porch.
But she was no different than the rest
of them: crazy women raising crazier
daughters, their Ukrainian names dropped
at the border. In college, I visited an exhibit
on genocide and cried like a baby. Where
does crazy come from? For years,
my grandmother’s parents grew food
they couldn’t eat. Rationing, they called it.
Punishment. My mother’s sister beat her
when she went crazy. My mother swallowed
too many pills when she decided she didn’t
want to live. I take Zoloft in the morning.
I drink too much beer.  At the exhibit
there were pictures: bodies and bodies
and bodies that couldn’t escape.




Air Boss

Those weekends you wore a fancy suit,
your uniform traded for civilian clothes

I didn’t recognize - though you woke early still
to polish your shoes as if on instinct.

I would get up with you those mornings
to sit in the garage as you ironed your jacket,

one hand smoothing out the creases,
the other smoking cigarette after cigarette

in the hazy morning light. Your job - they called
you Air Boss as if anyone could control air -

was to tell the show planes when and where
to land, to communicate through headsets

and hand gestures with the pilots up in the air.  
I thought you were a magician then, orchestrating

tricks between layers of atmosphere. But
I skipped the last show you directed -

by then you’d showed me the den of screens
where you watched the blinking curlicues

of the planes. I knew then there was no
magic to you. The trick was hollow

like a log. The weekend of your last show
I stayed home alone instead, pacing

the empty halls like a bird above its prey,
like a rescue plane circling tragedy.




Blueprint

In my spare time, I make a house
of horrors, charge admission, spruce
it up with cobwebs, replicate the spider
that once bit me on the torso while I used
the spare bathroom in the hall. Red lines
spread out from the center, symmetrical
inversions like a child’s painting of a flower.
In the bedrooms, I put in torture chambers,
BDSM whips and chains holding missing limbs
and fingers. Loudspeakers play the blues,
a hall of mirrors nearby to reflect the sadness -
circus ones where you always look fat.
In the main bath, a mermaid swims in a tank
of blood water. In the dining room, there’s nothing
but onions and sludge. The coffeemaker
in the kitchen is broken - though the red light
still turns on to confuse you. Outside, you find
yourself naked in front of all your friends.
Someone videos you with your tits out
and whispers they’re no good anyway.
If you try hard enough, it could just be a dream -
dead soldiers floating behind the house
on hologram horses. There’s a pill you could
take to make yourself smaller. The exit
is in the corner.  On the blueprint,
I highlight it in yellow, a point of egress
for those who still believe in escape.




Cycles

At the end of each summer, the myrtles
in our yard shed their bark in rough curlicues
the way snakes lose their skin upon growing.
The ringlets get lost in the moss beneath them,
pools of useless tendrils. No one’s ready yet
for raking - the leaves are green, the air
still incessant and wet - and so for months
they sit like lost things waiting for burial.
Is August the month for grief? It’s too hot
to wear tights with this dress. Our myrtles
flower only where sun has touched them
directly, the undersides baring no flowers
and by September one or two less layers
of bark. When I die, I want top shelf liquor.
I want French songs. I want someone
to call me crazy. When we return home,
the shedding is almost complete, the flowers
done blooming, the bark disappeared into
the ground like wavy lines of yarn in carpet.
I still know nothing about plant life, am still
confused about things like the life cycles
of frogs or how bees take pollen and make
honey. When my children ask why the bark
peels, when they take the molting skin between
their fingers like batons, the only answers
I have are ones I make up on the spot.

​

Emily Lake Hansen is the author of the chapbook The Way the Body Had to Travel (dancing girl press). A 2018 Best of the Net Nominee, her poetry has appeared in Nightjar Review, Atticus Review, Stirring, 8 Poems, and SWIMM Every Day among others. When she's not writing, you can find her in Atlanta playing entirely too many children's board games.

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