Poetry by Mare Heron Hake

             ​  Mike Maguire CC



Raising Cain 


when some hours are cocooned, wrapped in recall with tendon gut or string, or saturated bark, and the person in front of you says no you don’t remember correctly but of course you do, you remember it as the veins of your body dictate form and the breath of your body belongs in your lungs. you will always remember the day of when. of how what was, was in front of you, began its long slip away, in first shades of subtle and brutal the blue eyes of a hurt child reduced to the flat horizon of their own ocean, such was the day of loss. you know it and have always known it,  you taste it in every meal with a spice you never wanted to add, the day of change, of what, of molt, of discard, you’ve simply done everything you can to never welcome it, so do not focus on the details of any delusion, don’t listen or look for who was before the final trap, their self is buried deep, deep in the chamber, the catacomb of rib bones, the ossified outline of every event in their different lives and you do remember, you remember it all as best you can, the day break of their mouth, the terrible nebulae of the gaslight, the lies of raising Cain. 





this is my poem about beer

this could be about the heatwave the way everything is about the heatwave as the water dries and the plants curl and the people are in distress and let’s talk about horses. because who doesn’t love a horse, love something bigger than themselves with hearts as large as a human head and necks big enough to lift a yoke, pull a cart full of field stone or hay or tourists they don’t seem to mind but I don’t have a horse as a friend, so it isn’t that. once on the almost hottest day in June I went walking and the butterflies were many, those tiny wings known to be fragile, so delicate, they are living metaphors.  in every tall grass surrounding the blackberries’ thorn, hovering in the lavender, I walked in the middle of little figures all in white or maybe yellow because who can tell exactly when the yellow is pale as first light before the heat and last light in the smoke, pale and clean as a moment of rest. and then I was home, and then I had a beer, and the yellow in my glass was the same as the beginning and the ending sunlight, and the day was very. the day was real. in the wet and sparkling glass.

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Mare Heron Hake (she/hers) holds an MFA from NILA, the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts, where she studied closely with David Wagoner. She is a Poetry Editor, Owner, and Publisher of Tahoma Literary Review, as well as a wife, mother, and caregiver, a lover of dinosaurs and crows and a big fan of old movies. Her recent book, SurvivalEye (Arroyo Secco Press, 2021) is now available on Amazon and in other venues.

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